I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.
We don't usually post on all the Fallout 3-related sales, but considering the popularity of Steam it'll probably interest quite a few people that Fallout 3 is now 50% off in an early-started weekend deal.
Weekend Deal - Save 50%
What better way to enjoy your weekend than to fight for survival against the terrors of a post-nuclear Washington D.C.? Fallout 3 is 50% off, this weekend only. 44,99€ 22,49€
Plenty of reviews for Point Lookout have popped up, and the consensus seems to be this is one of the better DLCs. G4.
Point Lookout has taken development lessons and fan criticism from Operation Anchorage, The Pitt and Broken Steel into account, successfully eliminating almost all of their problems, resulting in the Fallout 3 expansion we've all been waiting for. Point Lookout takes place away from the wastelands, but rather than dumping players into a small, contained new environment, Point Lookout is its own new zone. There's plenty to explore, with many new adventure triangles tugging at you in the corner of the screen. I'd tried to keep myself on the main quest path in order to finish Point Lookout as soon as possible, but failed more than a few times -- I just had to see what was hidden away.
There’s a level of cleverness in the writing of the quests in “Point Lookout” that reminds of The Dark Brotherhood quests from “Oblivion.” A dark twinge with a definite sense of humor is present in all of them. For example, one has you taking soil samples from around the landscape to determine if the leftover bodies from the Civil War have made “Point Lookout” a viable oil drilling location.
There's little reason to return to Point Lookout once all the quests are completed. With the exception of Operation Anchorage, previous expansions included collection trade-ins, like super mutant blood samples for the Brotherhood of Steel to study or parts toward building a new Liberty Prime in Broken Steel. In The Pitt, players won access to the steel refineries to convert scrap metal into ammunition. The most Point Lookout has to offer is a chance to distill moonshine for booze and profit. The problem with this system is that punga fruit is one of the main ingredients of moonshine, and you need a lot of it. Although they grow naturally in the wild, they don't seem to grow back - at least not in any amount of time we were willing to sit for. Plus, despite infiltrating the cult, we were never privy to the secrets of refined punga fruit harvesting, so there went our dreams of cornering the market. Over time, players will eventually exhaust all the fruit in the area, leaving little reason to return. Installing the add-on stocks punga fruit in the inventory of many of the traders across the Capitol Wasteland, but that simply underscores the point.
Unlike in Broken Steel, the new weapons you can find in Point Lookout aren't very flashy. The Double-Barrel Shotgun is widely available at shops, hidden in containers, and dropped from enemies. It's got more power than the unique Terrible Shotgun, but fires two shells with each shot and has to be reloaded after every shot. It's pretty effective at taking out multiple weaker enemies in VATS, though you have to be careful - there's a bug where if you only have one shell remaining and try to fire the two-shell shot in VATS, the game will lock up on you. There's also a Lever-Action Rifle, which holds 10 rounds and is pretty accurate over long distance in VATS, but isn't particularly powerful. One quest reward will give you a unique version of this - the Backwater Rifle - with a bit more kick. There are also some new melee weapons - an axe, a shovel, and a couple knives, with unique versions of each that do even more damage. The unique axe, The Dismemberer, has a pretty quick attack rate and does about as much damage as the Lever-Action Rifle. The final new weapon is the Microwave Emitter, a damage-dealing version of the Mesmetron that does about as much damage as a shotgun but is pretty difficult to aim and use outside of VATS.
Each expansion to Fallout 3 has been more expansive than the last. Operation Anchorage was pretty confined, The Pitt added a small-scale new city, Broken Steel offered reasonably open areas and a new level cap, and now Point Lookout trumps all three with an enormous, open area to traverse, adding about as much real estate to the game as the other three expansions combined. The swampy region of Point Lookout has a unique look that sets it apart from the DC wastelands, with forested marshes, deserted plains, and rugged cliffs being battered by ocean waves. With dozens of locations to discover, explorers could easily be traversing the wetlands for hours hunting everything down. Mutated wastelanders and feral ghouls roam this region, and players will have to stay sharp to survive, as Point Lookout is the most challenging of Fallout 3's additional quest lines. If you've ever complained about Fallout 3's expansions not being "big enough," Point Lookout surely won't disappoint.
My personal favorite quest, "The Velvet Curtain," involved completing the mission of a long-dead Chinese spy. Even though my character showed up about a hundred years too late, I still felt like James Bond when I was tracking down a person whose molar contained submarine self-destruct codes or when I was using special glasses to discover a hidden bunker and uncover hidden equipment caches with items vital to my success. All of the side-quests are incredibly solid, and they give you incentive to stick around Point Lookout long after you've finished the work you came here to do. I'm still combing the map to look for new locations and rewards, as this place really is stuffed to the gills with adventure.
Point Lookout also contains some nasty new adversaries in the form of inbred swampfolk, insane cult members and amphibious mire-lurks and swamplurkers. Admittedly, they are all re-skinned versions of other creatures in the Fallout 3 universe, but they suit the rustic swamp environment better than say, a team of super mutants would.
Some of the new creatures are also far tougher than enemies that players may have faced up until now; the Feral Ghoul Reavers, in particular, are diabolically hard opponents. Players may have encountered them before in the Capital Wasteland, but in Point Lookout they seem more dangerous than ever. Not only can they reduce your health by half with three well-placed blows, they also hurl radioactive goop with uncanny accuracy which can cripple limbs at around 300 yards. They also have the ability to absorb damage as though they're made out of Teflon; most weapons may as well be peashooters for all the harm they do to these creatures (notable exceptions being the Gatling Laser, the Tesla Cannon and the Gauss Rifle). To top it all off, most Feral Ghoul Reavers hunt in packs, so you can be assured of doing a lot of running (and when that fails, dying) in most encounters with them. The swampfolk, also hunt in groups and in large numbers they can be quite deadly – they can also end up fighting among themselves on occasion which is useful if your health is running low.
However, even though the focus has shifted towards exploring, there are still some hardcore firefights to be had. There are some new low-tech weapons to be found in the mix are shovels, axes, and double-barreled shotguns. The battles are action-packed and implemented very well within the base game’s combat system.
Unlike the other DLC, there are a couple features that really stick out besides the different type of environment to explore. First, this is one area that you are not going to want to explore unless you have purchased the Broken Steel DLC. If you are anything less than level 20, I highly suggest staying in Washington DC. Fighting insane inbreed hicks is a lot more difficult than it sounds as they are some of the game’s toughest enemies. I never thought I would get so much use out of my Tesla Cannon, the killer weapons to find during Broken Steel. Without this powerful gun, my time in the swamp would have been a lot harder.
There's also a video review available from GameTrailers (thanks Alphadrop).
Glutton Creeper, erstwhile of an attempted Fallout PnP but now turned into post-apocalyptic Fallout-clone PnP Exodus, has released a few more books for post-apocalyptic pen and paper players.
Exodus Wasteland Bestiary
Format: Softbound (96 pages b/w) The Wasteland Bestiary is a stand-alone OGL product to be used in conjunction with the Exodus d20 Survivor's Guide or Exodus OGL Survivor's Guide. The Bestiary details common animals and other wasteland terrors that survived the Exodus through adaptation, evolution, and mutation. A fully customizable creature build system (similar to the Custom Class) is built into the Bestiary along with a alternative EXPERIENCE combat system.
The Exodus Wasteland Bestiary is fully compatible with any Modern or 3.5 books.
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Exodus Southwest Wasteland Guide
Format: Softbound (166 pages b/w)
The Southwest Wasteland Guide is a stand-alone OGL product to be used in conjunction with the Exodus d20 Survivor's Guide or Exodus OGL Survivor's Guide. The Southwest Wasteland Guide expands the character build details presented in the Survivor's Guide, offering a new class template, feats, occupations, talents, and traits, as well as organizational-based Advanced Classes and new equipment. Additionally the organizations and settlements of the southwest United States briefly detailed in the Survivor's Guide are expanded greatly detailing the goals and leadership of each one.
The Exodus Southwest Wasteland Guide is fully compatible with any Modern or 3.5 books.
NMA's Michael Grizzly takes a romp through Bethesda's 4th DLC, and...
Combat aside, one of the highpoints of Point Lookout are the NPCs, the ones that don't shoot you, at the least. Compared to the cardboard cut-outs most of vanilla Fallout 3 characters are, the inhabitants of Point Lookout are interesting, have some good writing and wouldn't feel out of place in one of the classic games (their lack of swamps aside).
Furthermore, as this add-on has an obvious focus on exploration I have to say that it doesn't disappoint - the State Park is littered with unique locations, most of which have a backstory presented in game and finding them feels really rewarding as does discovering their history, especially of the sinister Turtledove Detention Camp.
But the enjoyable exploration is marred by an ailment the original Fallout 3 suffers from - the game is confused as to when it takes place. It's two centuries since the war and yet you seem to find working power and lighting wherever you go, undisturbed corpses and buildings filled with loot that no one seemed to think of taking, even though they're right next to it, terminals that have been running for 200 years without failing... when playing, it feels more as if it was a little over a decade since the war. While in the Capital Wasteland it can be excused to a certain point, as it was ravaged by war, it's not excusable for there to be unlooted easily accessible locations in an area which didn't suffer direct nuclear destruction.
The major draw to Point Lookout, though, is its emphasis on exploration. The vast area takes you from a rocky shore dominated by a lighthouse into the depths of a swampy, irradiated forest filled with inbred country folk. Point Lookout is a Civil War landmark and that history was not lost on the game designers. Along with more history on the fictional Great War that felled civilization, you'll also find nods to another of America's real life great battles.
Point Lookout may be the best DLC yet. It brings much-needed environmental diversity to the game, while also hitting the exploration and collection aspects of the Fallout 3 game experience. The action is more intense than ever, including one prolonged indoor battle that is worth replaying over and over. The encounter is one of Fallout 3's most memorable, thanks to a pace that makes it feel like a John Woo film and a layout that's perfect for non-stop intense firefights.
With over thirty locations, you’ll be exploring for a while. Just be sure to bring your best weapons along, since even some of the random encounters try to evoke a horror movie feeling and take absurd amounts of damage; one was still going after four direct hits from a missile launcher! But be sure to leave some inventory room open, because Point Lookout has a lot of new weapons to play with and a fair number of them are worth having. Of special interest is that many items evoke a ’rural’ theme, which could probably be used to make a stereotypical redneck character if you’re so inclined.
Loved
Creepy Creeps:Point Lookout is no Resident Evil. It's not as scary as the first of those games. But it's got a double-barreled shotgun and plenty of shambling enemies to be shot with it. It's got a boarded up mansion, a propensity to exhaust its visitors' ammo supply, and some great psychological tricks similar to what Bethesda's designers dabbled with in one of the Vaults in the core game. It also has a bunch of new inbred enemies and a lot of people swinging axes in close quarters where your rifle is poor defense. If you like to panic while playing your games, this is the Fallout 3 DLC for you.
Beauty And The Beach:Games grounded on real world terrain such as Grand Theft Auto and Fallout benefit from art designers who draw from interesting elements of real geography. Forget lava bridges and rainbow roads. There's beauty in bringing a strong art style and the player witnessing it to craggy cliffs that overlooking a shipwreck and the shoals of sand exposed by low tide. A smoky sky, a looming Ferris wheel, a lone lighthouse in the distance, a cave littered with coffins… this is the scenery to make you feel uneasy.
Hated
Strange Pace: It starts hard. It ends easy. There are lots of optional side mission, at least one that was surprisingly simple for a Level 26 hero. An expansion's degree of challenge certainly doesn't need to be set to a steady incline, but when you feel like it's getting good is when it's ending.
Sadly, Point Lookout is marred, somewhat, by the persistent glitches that come with a massive game like Fallout 3. During my time in the town my game crashed a few times both in loading screens and when using V.A.T.S. I also encountered some problems with water textures, my map marker telling me to go the wrong way, and myriad slowdown and framerate issues in certain areas. Fallout 3 DLC has become infamous for problems ever since the debacle with The Pitt, so it’s a shame to see it still happening. Of course you may encounter no problems at all with your version while others will experience loads; it’s just a risk you need to be willing to take.
Interesting above all are the new enemies, who all fall under the class of ‘Swampfolk’. (There are re-skinned versions of Mirelurks and Ghouls, but nothing important.) These characters establish a satirical tone in the DLC, being, essentially, rednecks combined with Super Mutants. They’re ugly and mutated, but have interesting dialogue with a southern twang. The dialog choices are much more comical also, with the most hilarious line being “I usually dump my bodies in the river, but this is nice too,” a line your character can say after seeing a man’s underground necromancer’s lair. Point Lookout is more obviously a black comedy than any previous component of Fallout 3.
Graphic and Audio improvements with the game are noticeable of course as we see a new area which is a swamp area full of man and beast of various types we have and have not seen before. There is also a helpful fruit which can heal you that grow in several areas of the swamp but be warned there are some seriously inbred mutated farmers guarding some of them. New weapons are mostly rifles but if you played the previous expansions you character’s kit should be well stocked with enough firepower to thwart any redneck rampage.
Audio wise the games normal sound effects and music are the same high quality but I was extremely impressed by the amazing voice over work which is better than the original games voice acting. Most of the characters have a slight southern drawl to a deep accent which would not seem out of place in any horror movie taking place in the southern US of A.
Which is kind of odd considering Point Lookout does not take place in the southern US of A.
We're close to the release of Operation: Anchorage on the PS3, Eurogamer reports.
Bethesda has told Eurogamer that "finishing touches" are being made to Operation: Anchorage on PS3, but offered no firm release date for the Fallout 3 content. We had been prepared for a late June launch.
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"Yes, quite a bit actually," he said. "It's a different platform with a different way of doing things and it requires special attention and plenty of testing before it's released."
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Testing being the operative word; Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt and Broken Steel all arrived on Xbox 360 amid technical problems. Point Lookout, on the other hand, arrived this week without incident.
In an ongoing project, quite a few of our modders have been modifying and adding new human critters to the Fallout critter DB. This is paintstaking work, but we've got quite a few results in already, though I do not think they've completed any full set (all armour all angles all weapons). The people working on it include x'il, Grayswandir, lisac2k, Jotisz, Brother Soifran, Josan12 and Mr.Wolna, but I can't figure out who did what exactly so they'll have to come take credit for their own.
Speaking of long hair dude, Josan12 contacted us to inform us that while this modification is 60% done, they're hitting roadblocks getting it finished. If there's anyone reading who'd like to help, please head over to that thread and volunteer.
So far unconfirmed, but Brian Fargo's inXile Entertainment has a new site and on that site one of the tab images is, well, of that peculiar Wasteland-ish flavour...
Fortunately, while inXile is looking for game designers with experience in shipped action or shooter titles, it is not related.
Hurray! Eurogamer is - as always - first and - as always - ebullient, 8.
Without giving anything away, the episode does the usual Bethesda trick of eventually giving you the chance to choose contrasting outcomes. Do you protect the "victim" of an attack, or do you take a contrary view and dig into their past and find out that, in fact, they are the bad guys? Or do you just figure out what the biggest reward is and base your decisions around that? As predictable and transparent as the formula is by now, it's still an irresistible one, and one where you're never quite certain who's the least detestable. As ever, this gives some of the missions a pleasing degree of replayability as you figure out the best outcome for your karma alignment, or simply which of the new perks are most useful to you.
I’m quite happy to admit that this resilience makes for a more enjoyable game. If plasma weapons cut through these guys like a hot knife through inbred butter, there wouldn’t be much of a challenge. And yet I find it hard to shake off the stupidity of a situation. My alien blaster will kill a heavily-armoured Enclave Commander in one shot, but Cletus McBanjo will often eat one and still come running after me. Indeed, he and his cousins (who are also his brothers, uncles and lovers) are able to take up to six shotgun blasts to the head before they finally take a dirt-nap - and I’m talking about the new double-barrelled shotgun, which supposedly does a truckload of damage with each hit.
It’s a minor flaw, but I still think Bethesda could have found a way around it. While I’m complaining, I’m not sure if the new weapons will be used much when players take them back to the main wasteland (you can go back any time you like, incidentally). The new shotgun and the lever-action rifle are a good fit for the atmosphere of Point Lookout, but they’re otherwise a bit dull in comparison with Fallout’s existing arsenal. More interesting is The Dismemberer - a special axe you can find that causes people to burst into little giblets. It’s a bit silly, but it’s also a lot of fun to use.
You could even go as far as to say it’s Fallout 3 at its worst, most of the enemies being the berserker variety – Mirelurks and the like – best dealt with by turtling and spending vast amounts of ammo. Most of its awards replenish that inventory, the suspicion being that much of the game will simply cancel itself out unless you’re grinding, which, chances are, you’re not. Like Operation Anchorage and The Pitt, you can visit Point Lookout whenever you like, making it a potential goldmine of perks and experience points. But for level 30 characters, which might well account for most of its visitors, it’s little more than a day at the seaside.
So, then: the best expansion so far and the game at its worst. Such a contradiction could only be made by Bethesda. Here’s another one: while they’re all fundamentally the same, no two bits of Fallout DLC have been alike. Fans are comfortable with these enigmas, and with just six weeks passing since Broken Steel, it’s hard to begrudge such a regular supply.
The creepy tone is set early. The new Hillfolk enemies look like they’ve been ripped straight from Deliverance. During battles, it’s common to hear them yelling "SCREAM! SCREAM FOR ME! AHAHA!" They also can pack quite a punch in a group and are more than formidable. But the creepiest moment comes in a bog, where inhaling a certain gas sends you on a hallucination. There are fake bobbleheads, giant sewing needles that pop out of the ground, exploding Nuka Cola bottles that rain from the sky, and, at one point, you find a skeleton that is apparently your mother. It was a mind trip that had me on the edge of my seat, and really made the experience come alive.
The feel of Point Lookout is very different to the main quests with it having a haunted feel for inspiration, with the spooky houses, crazy locals at the swamp and an awful lot of dolls heads on pikes it feels like something out of an 80's slasher movie. The whole experience is like a mini version of the main game with all of the adventuring and fighting you would expect.
Kotaku has an editorialesque on the WG stat in Fallout 3.
What bothered me about Fallout was not so much that the heavy weapons, like a Flamer, weighed only "15." Maybe they're made from futuristic lightweight metal. No, it's more that a pair of freaking TWEEZERS was equivalent in weight to a motorcycle helmet. It's not even that the WG figure represents a total encumbrance factor – that either the item's size or fragility makes it difficult to carry - because a pool cue has the same WG figure: 1.
So I chatted up Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks, Fallout 3's game director, about this. First off, is "WG" equivalent to anything?
"Not really," Todd said. "It's sort of close to pounds, but we intentionally don't really say what it is. It actually started based on the weights we used for The Elder Scrolls, which most people don't know are the also-amorphous ‘stones.'"
OK, fine. If they didn't peg WG to something, I will. And I'm going to base it on the weight of beer. A bottle in Fallout is 1 WG. In real life, a bottle of beer, depending on how stout it is, will weigh roughly three-quarters of a pound when you figure in the glass. By figuring my total burden as it relates to at least one item in my possession, I could start imagining how large a load I was carrying around.
But what I couldn't measure is ammo, meds and chems, which have no weight value - and I wasn't going down to the local needle exchange to weigh whatever approximates a Jet syringe. Why didn't Bethesda give them a weight? Because in the game, these are very valuable items. Why wouldn't an RPG, which is more based in realism and more dependent on choice-making than other genres, also require players to be more conscientious about what they're carrying?
"In regards to ammo and money, it's just too granular a decision for the player, if they had weight," Todd said. "You don't want to make that a choice for the player; he already has to manage so much in his inventory and you need things he can find that are an instant win - ammo, money, drugs, etc, things that help keep him alive and playing. It would just bog the game down too much to find ammo and be thinking, ‘Do I want to pick up two of these bullets or the whole stack?' We felt that decision should be on [which] weapons to carry, not what ammo."
ZeniMax buys id Software. Relevance to us: zero. Unless Bethesda tries to use the id Tech 5 engine for Fallout 4, which, with their inability to handle even a solid undemanding engine like Gamebryo, would be pretty hilarious.
I feel like I could've written this newspost a week ago.
Anyway, seems like it's the 4th buggy DLC release in a row for Bethesda, though it seems a bit early to determine whether these are sporadic or universal issues, Cinemablend reports.
Point Lookout, the fourth downloadable episode for Fallout 3, arrived on the PC and Xbox 360 this morning. In what's become sort of a common routine with Fallout 3 DLC, a few bugs have cropped up.
A few users on the Bethesda forums are already reporting freezing and other glitches. The complaints mention both the Xbox 360 and PC versions.
It's tough to say just from a couple complaints whether these are universal issues, though. Most North American folks are at work or school now so we'll see if the volume of complaints picks up later in the day. The last two downloadable episodes The Pitt and Broken Steel experienced issues though so it's not outside the realm of possibility for bugs to crop up in Lookout, too.
Fallout 3 has been patched to 1.6, another update purely to add achievements, this time for the Point Lookout DLC. Download them from our Fallout 3 patches folder.
The latest Fallout 3 DLC can now be downloaded, at least if you're not Japanese and if you're willing to part with 800 of those "Microsoft Points". Currency just keeps getting dodgier. Here's the game description in case anyone forgot:
Buy a ticket and hop onboard the Duchess Gambit, as Tobar the Ferryman takes you to the strange seaside town of Point Lookout. What secrets does the dilapidated boardwalk hold? Who lives in the sprawling mansion? Why is the Punga Fruit so important? And what horrors lie in the depths of the murky swamp? Point Lookout is the most open-ended DLC yet, and allows you to explore an entirely new and expansive gameplay area any way you’d like. A completely new questline allows you uncover the town’s hidden secrets, and wield powerful new weapons like the Double-Barrel Shotgun against the swamp’s dangerous, and deformed, denizens. So venture to Point Lookout, if you dare. Just pray it’s not a one-way trip.
I hate Tobar the Ferryman so much. Look out for tons of reviews in the near future.
Crazy foreign site Grupo 97 has posted an interview with the Sawyer, not about New Vegas but about games in general. Of jumbled word order sometimes beware and also of italicized text.
- Some people say videogames cannot be taken seriously as developers are the first ones not doing it. Not talking about their jobs really, but to the fact of considering videogames as a real artistic expression medium instead. Could that be true?
Game developers often take their jobs very seriously and pour their hearts into their work, but I believe developers and publishers often do not use games as a medium for exploring serious themes or issues. And when games are used to explore themes, such exploration is normally done through proxies (e.g. elves vs. dwarves as an exploration of racism). Because these proxies are alien to us, the emotional impact of their struggle is often diminished. I think that designers should attempt to ground their themes in issues that will really resonate and raise questions with the audience. It's difficult but important.
It must be Awesome O'Clock, as Mash has updated his high resolution patch for both Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.
Highlights of version 2.1:
Added the 'Options' button to the Main-menu.
Screen resolution can be set in-game via a button on the 'Option/Game-Pref Screen' when accessed via the Main-menu.
When subtitles are enabled, a space will automaticly be created for them at the bottom of the movie screen.
Added some side art to fill the blank areas either side of the IFace-Bar.
It is maybe the last PL interview with Jeff Gardiner you'll ever need. Or maybe it isn't. Platform Nation posted it.
Can you give us any hint as to what the story of Point Lookout is?
Once the player arrives in Point Lookout they’re directed to a mansion that appears to be on fire. Once inside, the player gets entangled into helping a Ghoul named Desmond defend the mansion, and from there is asked to infiltrate a local cult known as the “Tribals,” to find out how they’re modifying the local Punga fruit and to delve into what else they’re hatching. The player will ultimately have to choose sides, a choice that isn’t black and white .
How long after announcing the first 3 DLC did the team decide that you wanted to continue making more?
How many DLC we were going to create was always ‘up in the air.’ That being said, we had the idea for Zeta early but decided not to create it initially. When we did decide to create two more, it was at the top of the list.
The codes sold by GameStop don't work anymore, but apparently they did work before. And footage of Point Lookout has been put online. Spoiler warnings apply:
