A new-found appreciation for Fallout 3

Apollyon said:
- Have you ever taken a similar approach as I did, traveling directly into the Wasteland or D.C., avoiding the main quest altogether?
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I avoided the main quest in Fallout 4. That game was, and probably still is unplayable without mods... but there are some very good mods that completely overhaul the balance of the game and make it a decent shooter/looter with character progression. My Fallout 4 run was heavily modded. Every aspect of the game - changed. There was even bullet physics and with a lot of drugs you could strafe out of minigun spray from a certain distance. Seeing the bullets in V.A.T.S. was awesome.

What bugs me to this day is that when ran out of things to do I did the main quest... and it bugged. The game literally soft-locked itself and wouldn't complete a quest in the Institute after being out for years. And what was even more bizarre was the fact that the F4 community on Steam did not help when I posted for help. I got a few snarky remarks instead... I had to complete the quest via a console command in the end.
 
Apollyon said:
Have you ever taken a similar approach as I did, traveling directly into the Wasteland or D.C., avoiding the main quest altogether?
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I just thought that was the way to play it honestly. Do people seriously make a bee-line for every quest? Why even play an open world game then, and specifically one that's about exploration...

Apollyon said:
- What do you think of the design decision to railroad the player to civilization (Megaton) after leaving Vault 101?

- What is your opinion on fast-travel in the Fallout franchise?
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Hubs can be good and fast travel is inferior to contextual travel options, but Megaton was mostly just okay and merely pointing to a spot on the map and watching a marker track across it a la Fo and Fo2 isn't much better respectively.

Apollyon said:
which design philosophy do you prefer?
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I lean towards NV, but it's not totally ideal. When you get somewhere developed for a quest then NV shines, and certainly outdoes Fo3, but it largely lacks open exploration. Almost everything is tied to something. Quest locations are freaking everywhere. You have routes thrown at you left, right, and center. And when it comes to places you can just find and freely wander through, they tend to be less developed. The easiest fix I can think of is to use procedural generation to create spaces in between all the handcrafted wonderment, and throw in some contextual travel so that people have options.
 
Norzan said:
And what good elements in Fallout 3? What are these fabled good elements in this trash heap some people keep babbling about? There are at best a few passable elements, but the game is a colossal disaster. And there's even one thing i forgot that this game did: it warped the series to such a degree that now a lot of people think the series is actually about shooting, looting and exploring, when the series was actually about the politics and how you could influence them, basically changing the wasteland based on your choices. That is actually what Fallout is about, not the nonsense Bethesda tricked people into believing.
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Fallout 1 and 2 aren't about politics tho

Fallout doesn't have any large scale politics and in Fallout 2 there's like one or two sidequests about new reno/vault city/ncr, hardly political simulator.

It seems like in your rants you kinda just make up stuff that isn't there in Fallout 1 and 2.

The writing was on the wall before Fallout 3, and that was Oblivion
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It was Morrowind in actuality. It's an adventure game with a few whistles and bells that's it. Not an RPG
 
TheHouseAlwaysWins said:
Fallout 1 and 2 aren't about politics tho
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Politics is a broad subject. It isn't just governments, i.e office politics. Any faction that has leadership has politics, including tribals. Any conflict between groups that involves diplomacy is political, even if the dialogue is crude.
 
About «fast-travel» (i hate that word), i think it is the bane of continuous gameworld. I expand more on it there.

About Megaton, there is ton of other issues, and it would take too long to list them, but the game is quickly spoiled when you get to the biggest city as soon as you start the game. It will only lead to disapointments on disapointments when you reach other settlements. It might be a bit formulatic, but by placing the biggest cities at 75% of your most expected progression, the rpg usually manage to make that location more impressive, as you get an actual feeling on how those cities actually stand out compared of what is around.

About going off-path, i had some fun protecting the caravans after the main quest. Maybe the most fun in the whole game, but that thing was hindered by how the game managed the caravans. Those idiots just wander around and get stuck somewhere. They never actually «reach» a city. They just spawn near a city when scheduled to, then leave it, but if you follow them, you will never reach another city. (plus other annoying bugs)
 
TheHouseAlwaysWins said:
Fallout 1 and 2 aren't about politics tho
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Politics is an extremely broad term and it's not just about goverment politics. It can be literally about two groups of people with different views on how things can be done, which happens quite a lot in Fallout 1 and 2. And hardly happens in Fallout 3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics To make it easier for you. Actually do your research first before coming off as an ignorant. Which you do a lot.

The main point of the series for the first two games and New Vegas is to explore ethics and politics of the factions in the wasteland. The Bethesda Fallout games are about exploring destroyed places to just shoot at enemies and collect junk. And when it tries to do something that is actually related to the main point of the series, it's most of the time clear cut good guys and bad guys. There are no nuances or anything that can make even the more brutal factions seem they have an actual logical motivation.

TheHouseAlwaysWins said:
It seems like in your rants you kinda just make up stuff that isn't there in Fallout 1 and 2.
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Or you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about and you just make baseless claims. Which is about 90% of what you post here honestly.
 
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Veers said:
At least they give you something. NV proved it was a dialogue system that could work very well.
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Just a piece of trivia:

Did you know that Obsidian didn't use Bethesda's dialogue system? Obsidian has their own in-house dialogue system made by themselves for their games, and they altered the developer's kit that Bethesda gave them (to make FNV) to be able to use that dialogue system?

:bow:
 
Norzan said:
The main point of the series for the first two games and New Vegas is to explore ethics and politics of the factions in the wasteland.
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Fallout: Tactic is also doing that to some extend. Even if they weren't the original developpers and had a very rushed schedule, they still did it better than the current IP owners.
 
Veers said:
There's an entire city of kung-fu fighters and Yakuza you have to go through while a telepathic shaman astral-projects to you repeatedly throughout the main plot, and later talking Deathclaws with their own Deathclaw colony make up a major plot point. Are you going to tell me those things aren't dumb? And sure, the pop culture references are generally in sidequests, but 3 does the same thing. Both have goofy, dumb, anachronistic things in them. 2 wasn't some kind of morbidly serious and dark story.
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Fallout 3 has Mothershit Zeta, the most idiotic canon DLC for a modern Fallout game ever. It isn't passed off as The Lone Wanderer dreaming about it (oh god I'd wish.. I would of gave less of a fuck about it then), it actually happens. You get PICKED UP BY ALIENS, and the whole DLC happens in AN ALIEN SHIP where a LITTLE GIRL helps you gather several survivors, ONE OF WHICH IS A LITERAL JAPANESE FUCKING SAMURAI and the final battle is a literal fight between YOUR SHIP and another ALIEN SHIP using DEATH RAYS on each other. Let's not forget the audio holotapes where the aliens literally ABDUCT A COW and it keeps mooing as it gets dissected.

Oh and the worst thing of all? The holotape that implies the aliens made the nukes go off. That dreadful fucking holotape. I don't care if Bethesda cut it, it's still there in the game files and it SHOWS Bethesda's DUMB implications. And maybe it's not cut, maybe it's a bug. We've talked about it in my post about Mothershit Zeta and we talked about how this holotape conflicted with another. There were still subtitles but no audio, I believe. That's all you need to know.
You can see my Mothershit Zeta post here: http://www.nma-fallout.com/threads/...ter-eggs-bethesda-and-mothershit-zeta.216699/

And I'm sorry for all the caps and f-bombs, I don't want to be mean or insult you, but I have to EMPHASIZE for you, because you truly don't know how DUMB Fallout 3 is compared to Fallout 2.

And before you complain that you don't have to do the DLC at all in-game. Well, guess what, it is implied that the Lone Wanderer at some point did go through with it. It's canon, you can't avoid that. Sure, maybe the talking deathclaws and 70s thing are also canon, like they exist, but I don't think you, as The Chosen One, would waste your village's time on dealing with weirdos, he isn't forcefully abducted by them and he has to escape or whatever.

Fallout 2 sure is dumb and goofy now, huh?
 
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Apollyon said:
Relax. What is stopping you from disregarding all the goofy shit that happens in Fallout (not just in 3) as comic relief?
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Maybe because there's nothing funny about Mothership Zeta? :lmao:

Nevermind me, I'm just throwing kindle to the fire...
:flameon:
 
Apollyon said:
Relax. What is stopping you from disregarding all the goofy shit that happens in Fallout (not just in 3) as comic relief?
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Nothing's stopping me, but I can't for the hell of me disregard Mothershit Zeta as comic relief. What's so comical about a bullet-sponge-filled corridor shooter DLC in a RPG GAME (BY THE WAY) with your typical aliens, and not only that it's canon, but it implies aliens set off the nukes, which completely DESTROYS the whole point of Fallout, which is the fact that every SINGLE CONFLICT is man-made and how it's up to humanity to solve its issues. Throwing this third-party species into the mix, especially for CAUSING THE MAIN CONFLICT IN THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE (!!!!!!!!!!! INSTANT RED SIGN !!!!!!!!!!!) is NOTHING to laugh about.
That's not comic relief. That's an insult to the entire lore of the game, the whole point of the game and the fans of the series. It's too far, even for Fallout.

Another rant, I don't care if you are gonna declare me as an angry prick but honestly Fallout 3 just grinds my gears really hard, and it won't ever stop doing so. Just ignore the caps and swear words and actually take my opinion for granted and argue about it. The way I express myself IS the way I express myself and I could care less about how you think I should express my opinion. I might be a bit emotional but I don't let that over take me, I still get to the point and that's all that matters. I'm me and you're you. Okay?
 
Mfw all I have to do is ignore Bethesda's efforts and I still have a more or less solid trilogy of games to worship.

I+hope+you+have+_48d0fc14e7a4de4d51c26a83247666fa.jpg
 
Risewild said:
Just a piece of trivia:

Did you know that Obsidian didn't use Bethesda's dialogue system? Obsidian has their own in-house dialogue system made by themselves for their games, and they altered the developer's kit that Bethesda gave them (to make FNV) to be able to use that dialogue system?

:bow:
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Interesting. Where did you find this tidbit?
 
I think (I'm short on time at the moment so I will have to check it out later) it was from this interview with Feargus Urquhart, where he mentions something like them 'bolting on' their own tech to the game engine for New Vegas.

I also remember reading that in writing somewhere, but I don't have the time to keep looking for it at the moment.

Here is an interview were Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky talk a tiny bit about Obsidian's dialogue writing tool:
Leonard: They've been, for the past 15 years, refining their process. They have one of the best dialogue tools I've seen. Back in Arcanum and Vampire we were using Excel spreadsheets to write our dialogues. Very powerful tools, but very difficult to use at the same time. They've developed a lot of practices that make the kind of games we want to make easier to make. We don't then have to come in and say, 'Oh, here's how we make RPGs' because we all make RPGs the same way, and that's not the case when you go to other places. Every company has their own unique way of making games. It's weird coming into a company and it's like, oh yes, this is exactly how I make it.

Tim: Yeah, I can't overstate that idea. The tools. All of our RPGs have branching dialogues based on lots of conditionals and lots of text. Their tools here just handle that incredibly easily. And then when you want to localize them you literally press a button and all the strings have been sent it to the Italian localizer, all the strings have been sent to the Spanish localizer. It's the kind of thing that 15, 20 years ago we were pulling our hair out trying to do, and here it's just press this button, it's automated. It's really cool.
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