Did you all forget..

[Ausir]

yes they are, so it is impossible that those mutants are from the east side. Super Mutants live longer then humans, but they don't live 200-300 years.

Actually, they do. FEV makes them practically immortal (but they can be killed, of course), but they also get senile with age.

 

[Black]

Much bigger and more complex game

How interesting. How is it bigger and more complex? Because it takes more space on my hard-drive?

 

[DOF_power]

It's not that Bethesda didn't put in all the stuff we wanted, it's that the game breaks canon on numerous occasions. Why are there so many Super Mutants on the east coast, when the labs that made them are on the other side of the country? Why is the Brotherhood of Steel helping people out, when in the original games, all they cared about was getting more technology? Bethesda gave explanations for all these inconsistencies, but just because they can be explained doesn't mean they fit in Fallout canon.

Read above statements on supermutants and BoS.

Fallout 2 was somewhat over-saturated with pop culture references, but the ones in Fallout were part of what made the game so fun. And Fallout only took the elements from Mad Max that all post-apocalyptic settings share. It had several references to it, but I don't think they're enough to call it 'The Road Warrior: The Game'

Really ?!

Fallout 1 = Wasteland for the 90s
Fallout 2 = Wasteland for the 90s 1.5 meets Fountain of Dreams


Interplay has described Fallout as the spiritual successor to Wasteland, and many of those Fallout 1/2 elements actually came from Wasteland, Fountain of Dreams and some go deeper to the game that inspired them.

Yes, most of the NPCs didn't have much background or dialog options, but the ones that did were compelling characters that had a well-defined and interesting personality, and worked well considering the technical limitations of the game. I actually found them to be interesting to talk to, and wanted to know what their responses would be to the dialog options - something I can't say about Fallout 3. And the original Fallout games weren't party oriented. You could get a party if you wanted, and it would make things easier, but the game left that option up to you. In fact, the first time I played Fallout, I beat the entire game without having anyone in my party.

Master yes, the rest of characters for most part where recycled from it's spiritual predecessors, corny cliches, stereotypes and/or comic relief, not really alive for me, just planted there.

Apart for maybe the Modoc characters and their bed/shotgun wedding scenario the game characters didn't really felt that much alive.

Baldur's Gate II party members, like Minsc, had moments that felt truly alive for me.

Wasteland in witch the NPCs might temporarily refuse to give up an item or perform an action if ordered to do so (not a bug), made F1/F2 (and F3) look like a step backward in making NPCs feel alive.

This coupled with the party member lack of control and poor AI made Wasteland fanboys proclaim F1/F2 as a post-apocalyptic rpg for dummies, just as F1/F2 fanboys feel about F3.


Fanboys, fanboys never change.

Yes, the AI had some major issues in Fallout 1 and 2, but the games were released 10 years ago, and Black Isle Studios did the best they could. Bethesda doesn't have the same excuse with Fallout 3, as it's been in development for a long time, and they should have fixed the problems with their AI.

Compared to F1 or F2, my pal Charon didn't shot me in the back and some NPCs actually take cover.
Improved from Oblivion but without a script extender is will limited.

You COULD beat the original games very quickly, but only if you knew exactly what you were doing, took a very specific set of skills at the beginning, and essentially knew the entire plot. Otherwise, the game takes a very long time to beat, and has a lot of replay value - it was impossible to do everything your first run through.

How's that different from Fallout 3 ?!

The story lines in the original games were, essentially, find the Water Chip/GECK. However, they had a lot of backstory that was up to you to discover, and they both changed into something very different from what they were, and were executed in an interesting and often unexpected way.

F1's story tough not-quite-original/without-its-recycled-parts was somewhat better, but Fallout 2's ?!
Only the revelation spices it a bit.

Yes, Fallout 1 and 2 were very buggy. However, as I've stated before, they were released 10 years ago, with limited resources. Bethesda should have had plenty of time to find and fix the bugs in Fallout 3.

Look at Fable II, Vampires the Masquerade: Bloodline or Gothic 3 witch are modern comparable games; they make F3 look good.
No game this big will be anywhere near bug free regardless of time and resources.

We're not obsessed with child killing. The mods that some people are already working on are because we want the same freedom the original Fallout games gave you - which was a large part of why the games were so much fun. You could go through the game guns blazing, killing everyone in your path. You could gather together a group of people, outfit them with excellent equipment, and then let them do all the work for you. You could talk your way through the game. And yes, you could kill children if you wanted. The freedom to do whatever you wanted in the game world were a major part of the game, and we want the same freedom in the most recent installment in the series.
...
We do. We find, point out, discuss, and potentially fix every bug, issue, imbalance, exploit, and inconsistency in the original games. However, we have been doing this for 10 years, ever since Fallout was released, and most of the issues have already been resolved, or at least noted. Now, we're doing the same thing to Fallout 3, but people like you misinterpret that as being biased against it - simply because we don't complain about Fallout 1 and 2 as much. Fallout 3 was released a few days ago, and we're trying to mod it into the kind of game we want it to be - a true sequel to Fallout.

I'm waiting for mods too to make it better too, but as far as I'm concerned it is a true sequel.

 

[DOF_power]

How interesting. How is it bigger and more complex? Because it takes more space on my hard-drive?

Yes, there's a lot more complexity as opposed to an isometric game from 10/11 years ago.

 

[SoylentNinja]

Holy cow man did you even read the previous posts or did you just come in here just to stir shit up? Almost all of these things that you have mentioned have been discussed before and have been shown that they are not coherent with previous cannon or just didn't make sense.

Also in 2 of 3 examples you gave us for modern comparable games, the developers had a budget that was somewhat limited compared to Beth.

Also Trolls, trolls never change.

 

[Black]

Yes, there's a lot more complexity as opposed to an isometric game from 10/11 years ago.

Yes, I got that part. I didn't get the part where you show me this complexity.

 

[JOG]

And accusing me of "not knowing what Fallout is about".. if it wasn't stupid it would be funny I consider leaving hi-tech stuff available for level 1 character cheap and abusive, what does it have to do with me "not understanding fallout".

The point is that RPG was supposed to mean "Role - Playing - Game" 10 years ago - playing a role as in "to pretend" not "to play act" there aren't many kinds of characters that would wander the wastelands aimlessly (desert=hungry wild animals, heat, cold, lack of water and food) or are prescient/guided by a higher power and know exactly where to go.

Most folk would talk to other people, learn about new places, and be careful when someone tells them that the south is dangerous.


Bethesda redefined what RPG means, and thus we're having completely pointless discussions between today's RPG-fans and people that believed they played RPGs, 10, 20 or 30 years ago. So let's call Wizardry, Ultima, Wasteland, Dark Sun, Fallout, Baldur's Gate etc. ORGs (Old-fashioned Roleplayer's Game.)

What we're saying is that Oblivion and Fallout 3 are bad ORGs just like they are bad RTSs, and only mediocre FPSs. You don't go to a Half Life board and tell people that Fallout 3 is the best FPS ever, right?

Many of the folk here are old crocks that had their heyday in a time when ORGs were still wrongly called RPGs, and games like Elvira, Hexen, Heretic, Terminator (Bethsoft), Crusader etc. were called Action Adventures. And yes, Oblivion and most likely Fallout 3 are great Action Adventures for sure, but I don't really like this genre, if that makes me a bad person so be it. let me tell you a secret: I also don't like The Sims

 

[Edward Karlinski]

Hope I won't get accused for trolling for this topic. Let's clarify: I love F1 & F2 and I've spent a lot of time playing them and mastering them. And I don't even own Fallout 3 yet.

But, just by reading the F3 section here, I get amazed.

Did people forget how dumb and abusable the F1/F2 game mechanics could be?

Did you forget:

1. That the main plot took like three hours to finish, even without the navarro shortcut?
2. That you speedrun the game in 9 minutes?
3. That you could become a god that single-handedly slaughters entire enclave? (for those who say F3 combat is too easy/illogical)
4. That you could get advanced power armor a minute after finishing temple of trials? I know it was a stupid shortcut technique, but I still think such abuse shouldn't be possible. A level check needed to get the Navarro quest from Matt, voila.
5. That you missed people standing next to them (!?)
6. That ordinary people could survive several non-critical shots at the eyes (!?!?!?!?)
7. That you were basically super-accurate from the very beginning, assuming you tagged small guns and put a level or two worth of skill points into it? (for those who whine about too high accuracy in VATS of F3)
8. That NPCs kept bursting through each other and blocking your line of sight (when you were holding bozar or minigun)?
9. That in fact the game had little to none combat strategy at all because all you had to do was to keep lots of action points and aim at eyes / get sniper perk? I got through like 95% of fights with barely a scratch just by doing it.
10. That it was a very easy game (I died in it only after unlucky criticals that bypassed armor, and that's without the navarro shortcut ofc.) and the only difficult thing was defeating 6 or 9-person enclave patrols (the latter was a bit extreme) without losing a party member? You could get through all other fights without a scratch by using psycho which made almost every non-energy weapon attack in this game do 0 damage (not called gauss weaponry or deathclaw's claw), assuming you had decent DT. And psycho was everywhere. Also, the lockpick/speech checks were rather easy, even if they were assumed difficult (highest speech check was like 120 or so, which you could get at level three, and highest lockpick.. idk, 90 or so? and you had tools everywhere..) I played hard only, the other modes were a joke.

I also think F3 should have never become a FPS, but come on. The previous Fallouts weren't flawless in game mechanics. Why do you all suddenly forgot about it? It's called bias, you know.

Did you forget that nobody finished the main plot in three hours, let alone nine minutes, unless he was someone trying to say he did this? People who actually played the game for enjoyment got hundreds of hours of play out of Fallout 2, especially if they tried to attain 99th level before finishing the Enclave.

Did you forget that nobody could get Advanced Power Armor a minute after finishing the Temple of Trials without cheating. People playing a game for enjoyment do not do this. They do not make short fast travel hops and save then make some more to get the Advanced Power Armor. The random encounters in that area are guaranteed to kill any low level character that early in the game.

Fallout and Fallout 2 had many flaws, but they were top down turn based PC role playing games and not First Person/Third Person real time, multi platform shooters with role playing elements. Fallout 3 may be a good game, but it is not, and never can be a real Fallout game. Try not to forget that.

 

[Edward Karlinski]

DOF_power wrote:

This coupled with the party member lack of control and poor AI made Wasteland fanboys proclaim F1/F2 as a post-apocalyptic rpg for dummies, just as F1/F2 fanboys feel about F3.

I was there when Fallout and Fallout 2 were new, and there were NO Wasteland fanboys posting on any boards I read. So, please stop making things up to make false analogies.

 

[Gooscar]

Die-hard fans will say that the game breaks from Fallout canon, and it does -- to a point. The more I play Fallout 3, the more I realize that Bethesda took a lot of elements from the Fallout Bible, discarded what didn't fit or what didn't translate well into the game, and condensed a lot of the previous games' elements into something that was neat and coherent. Frankly, from what I've seen, they took the raw elements of Fallout and they polished them up so they actually looked good. If they crammed in all of Fallout canon, the game would be a mess.

It's not that Bethesda didn't put in all the stuff we wanted, it's that the game breaks canon on numerous occasions. Why are there so many Super Mutants on the east coast, when the labs that made them are on the other side of the country? Why is the Brotherhood of Steel helping people out, when in the original games, all they cared about was getting more technology? Bethesda gave explanations for all these inconsistencies, but just because they can be explained doesn't mean they fit in Fallout canon.

It's a matter of prespective.

From what I've decerned for myself, Fallout 3 is not a representation of the entire East Coast, it's closer to a fully fleshed out single city you'd find in in past Fallout titles to include the city limits, in this case it's the DC Metro area. So to say Super Mutants infest the East Coast can't be backed up by a single example.

I haven't gotten far enough into the game to see the explination of the Vault that's making the Super Mutants, but from what I've seen on the boards here and on the BethSoft site there's an arguement as to why would people turn themselves into super mutants if they're living in a Vault. The simplest answer I can come up with is another question: Why not? Could be a misinformed preparation for the radiated outside world that didn't go as planned, could have been a Vault dictated progam to do simply do so to see the results as per their social experiment, could be a number of things. I suspect a lot of it is secretly known by the folks at BethSoft, and purposely vague to allow players and fans to come up with their own explination, whether it's right or wrong.

Same thing with the more Arthurian Brotherhood of Steel in the DC area, why are they acting in this way? Again, why not? The time between FO1 and FO3, and the distance between the DC BOS and the West Coast BOS allow for this artisitic interpretation and deviation from past Fallout titles. If they were right next door to the BOS that were more like the Illuminati with Power Suits and heavy weapons, yes I could see the issue. However BethSoft took the time to explain the radical shift in priorities in a publish rather than just rely on ingame NPCs to explain why. Looking over the Fallout Bible entries Chris Avellone wrote, I don't see anything in there that says "Absolutely no!" to the possibility of a detacted faction of the BOS taking up Arthurian ideals and putting them above their primary mission of collecting technology.

There's only so much fact that can be extracted specifically from a video game's text without the support of developer/creator explination, because without an impartial explination, you only get a character's opinion which is moderately biased at best. You can say the DC BOS doesn't fit the THEME of the West Coast BOS, and that's fine. But saying the DC BOS violates prior BOS canon is a bad arguement because technically it doesn't from what I've read and experienced so far, it only deviates from the theme as a storytelling and characterization element.

It's somewhat like Obi-wan's description of Anakin in Episode 4, where he says Anakin was a good pilot and good friend. While we honestly know he wasn't just that, if we had taken Obi-wan's singular description of Anakin as absolute canon of who was Anakin, then there would be a lot of what Anakin did in episodes 1-3 that didn't violate that character's description, to include further details given by ghost Kenobi in later movies, and therefore break canon. However, Obi-wan statement is a veiled opinion, not and actual unbiased fact about a person/place/thing.

However the jury is still out on the Super Mutant stuff in my case.

If there is documentation that states the BOS would never act like the DC BOS under the provided circumstances and examples, then please point me to it, because I haven't seen anything that states otherwise.

 

[chaosapiant]

I agree that the idea of F3 breaking canon is absolute nonsense. Nothing in F3 was ever explicitly stated to be the contrary in the other games. Some things have "changed" as things do in time, and certainly these things can be disagreed with. But it seems that some people are unsure of the word canon. Canon is what "really happened" from the unique perspective of the game's universe. F3 simply takes some artisitic license with some stuff in the game.

If Bethsoft hadn't done so, and hadn't included things like supermutants, and the BOS, then people would then be complaining as to why Bethsoft didnt' include what some consider to be the "hallmarks" of the series.

Fallout means something a little different to everyone, but I firmly believe in the ways that matter most, Bethsoft nailed it.

 

[Sorrow]

And accusing me of "not knowing what Fallout is about".. if it wasn't stupid it would be funny I consider leaving hi-tech stuff available for level 1 character cheap and abusive, what does it have to do with me "not understanding fallout", don't be ridiculous.

It's left for a character that learns about Navarro or for character that randomly explores the dangerous wasteland. Navarro pretty big and hard to miss when one travels along the coast.
I remember finding Navarro at pretty high level and trying to find out what the hell it is. It was pretty cool.
It was in times when I didn't end the game when I died though. I had to reload a few times before getting there.

 

[Rev. Layle]

If there is documentation that states the BOS would never act like the DC BOS under the provided circumstances and examples, then please point me to it, because I haven't seen anything that states otherwise.

Actually (minor spoiler- AND if IIRC) - [spoiler:1abe82436f]there are outcast BOS in F3 somewhere that supposedly act a little closer the the west coast brethren, they explain that the DC-based BOS has went off the original path ideal-wise and behavior-wise.[/spoiler:1abe82436f]

 

[Sander]

Actually (minor spoiler- AND if IIRC) - [spoiler:9aa1c823bd]there are outcast BOS in F3 somewhere that supposedly act a little closer the the west coast brethren, they explain that the DC-based BOS has went off the original path ideal-wise and behavior-wise.[/spoiler:9aa1c823bd]

[spoiler:9aa1c823bd]Yep. Of course, the Outcast BoS does absolutely nothing otherwise, except that you can bring them some tech in exchange for supplies.[/spoiler:9aa1c823bd]

 

[Gooscar]

If there is documentation that states the BOS would never act like the DC BOS under the provided circumstances and examples, then please point me to it, because I haven't seen anything that states otherwise.

Actually (minor spoiler- AND if IIRC) - [spoiler:931663d52f]there are outcast BOS in F3 somewhere that supposedly act a little closer the the west coast brethren, they explain that the DC-based BOS has went off the original path ideal-wise and behavior-wise.[/spoiler:931663d52f]

Right, it's explained in the BOS Vault Diary on the main Fallout website. Some DC BOS soldiers felt that the Arthurian role was the right thing to do, and some felt that it was a violation of the core BOS mandate. Hence the divison.

It serves as a reminder that the DC BOS is not the norm, it's a deviant faction.