Fallout 3 playable to the public at PAX
- Thread starter Brother None
- Start date
Ok, got back from PAX today.
First thing, went to exhibition hall straight to Fallout 3 booth. After waiting for 1.5 hours, I finally got my chance to play (everyone got to play about 5-10 minutes). Pete Hines was next to me, guiding me along through some parts (my impression was that he was a nice person). Here's my walkthrough of the game and what I got to do. I'll talk about where I stand as fan afterwards. If you want a short abstract: reaction = positive, is it Fallout = negative.
(btw, those preview videos are pretty much the demo they showed at PAX and what I played through, except TenPenny tower.)
First thing, I'm in the vault. Open up the doors. I walk out of the small cavern entrance into the wasteland. A flash of white and then the wastes. I saw combat many times before, so I wanted to check out the town and catch some more of the dialogue. I headed straight for Megaton. A protectron robot greets me and I walk into town. Lucas Simms (I think that's his name) walks straight up to me and says, "behave or I'll fucking end ya," something like that. I, being a guardian of the wastes, behave politely and tell him I'll follow the rules. I go through the other dialogue choices. From my impressions of talking with Simms and other people in Megaton, I think (from what I saw of the demo) the dialogue is well done, if not decent. I thought dialogue choices and responses were similar to those you'd find in quality RPG games from the Infinity Engine games (BG, IceDale,) or even, dare I say, Troika's. It definitely wasn't the YES, NO, BYE, TELL ME MORE and other terse responses like in Oblivion.
In Megaton I picked a lock. From what I understood (Pete guided me through lockpicking/how it worked), lockpicking doesn't seem to be purely a mini-game. As I heard and understood from what Pete was telling me, the difficulty of being able to pick a lock does actually depend on your lockpick skill. I also talked to some crazy guy who worshipped a nuclear bomb. After browsing Megaton for a while I headed out to check out some combat.
First thing I fought was a bee. I picked VATS cause I loathe and am not very good at shooting in real-time games with a console controller (all stations of Fallout were running on the XBOX). Shot at the torso, racking up several pistol shots. Boom, Boom, Boom dead.
Long story short, next I walked down to a small destroyed city and went inside the super duper mart, shot at raiders, they shot back and I was killed by a raider w/machine gun. That was the end of my play trial.
------------
As a fan of F1,F2:
Well, did it feel like Fallout? No...yes...no....yes...well, see when you play the game you see things that are familiar. Vaultboy, the cave, the light, the vault door, mole rat, dean's electronics and a few other things that remind you of the first two games. Those kinds of things remind you that you're playing Fallout. However, the land, cities, people and even metagame aspects like the 3d graphics are just so foreign to the first two games that w/out those specific identifying factors from the first two games the game would not feel like Fallout in my opinion.
Combat:
I really, really loved turn-based combat in Fallout 1/2. It was one my favorite aspects of the game.
Of course, in Fallout 3, combat is nothing like it was in the first two games. The FPS is pretty much that. You aim and shoot. I'm pretty sure though, that statistics was involved despite it being real-time. I would shoot in real-time but it didn't seem like all bullets did damage despite shots being placed perfectly on the body.
VATS is real-time with pause. There was one thing that I wasn't clear about that worried me. It seemed like in FPS mode, you could shoot and shoot without stopping. In VATS, my AP would run out, I would have to go back to FPS mode to recharge AP and go back to VATS and do that over and over. It didn't seem like AP had any effect while in FPS mode.
Graphics:
Looked great. The wasteland looks devastatingly beautiful from what I saw in the demo. Even thought the same engine, graphics seem more polished than in Oblivion. I think it's more correct to say that the colors are richer. The wasteland had a palette of brown, yellow, and grayish tones. Bloom is horrible. Turn if off when you play the game. The models WILL remind you of Oblivion.
Dialogue:
*Read above* + my only gripe w/dialogue is that it seems like there is alot of cursing. I personally don't prefer a whole lot of it and it just seems like it has been inserted just for the sake of making it seem cool and gritty. No purpose to it, doesn't define characters. It's feels like it is used just because it exists.
Speculation:
Dungeons. From what I overheard Pete and Istvan talking w/others it seems like "dungeons" will be much better than what it was like in Oblivion. Unlike Oblivion's same looking random dungeons, it seems so called "dungeons" in Fallout 3 are specifically unique places such as super duper mart and springvale elementary. It seems each location has its unique design apart from the common waste/apocalyptic setting.
Bottom Line:
If you can't live w/out turn-based combat, isometric graphics, Mark Morgan and the soothing, barren flatness of the west coast wasteland you best steer clear of this game. You're not going to like it.
Is it the Fallout we know? Nope. Is it Oblivion w/guns? No, I don't think so. They changed things about this game in a way that it doesn't totally feel like a post-apoc Oblivion mod. If you don't mind and embrace changes, check it out. My personal feeling that I got from what I played is that it is going to be a fun game in its own right.
First thing, went to exhibition hall straight to Fallout 3 booth. After waiting for 1.5 hours, I finally got my chance to play (everyone got to play about 5-10 minutes). Pete Hines was next to me, guiding me along through some parts (my impression was that he was a nice person). Here's my walkthrough of the game and what I got to do. I'll talk about where I stand as fan afterwards. If you want a short abstract: reaction = positive, is it Fallout = negative.
(btw, those preview videos are pretty much the demo they showed at PAX and what I played through, except TenPenny tower.)
First thing, I'm in the vault. Open up the doors. I walk out of the small cavern entrance into the wasteland. A flash of white and then the wastes. I saw combat many times before, so I wanted to check out the town and catch some more of the dialogue. I headed straight for Megaton. A protectron robot greets me and I walk into town. Lucas Simms (I think that's his name) walks straight up to me and says, "behave or I'll fucking end ya," something like that. I, being a guardian of the wastes, behave politely and tell him I'll follow the rules. I go through the other dialogue choices. From my impressions of talking with Simms and other people in Megaton, I think (from what I saw of the demo) the dialogue is well done, if not decent. I thought dialogue choices and responses were similar to those you'd find in quality RPG games from the Infinity Engine games (BG, IceDale,) or even, dare I say, Troika's. It definitely wasn't the YES, NO, BYE, TELL ME MORE and other terse responses like in Oblivion.
In Megaton I picked a lock. From what I understood (Pete guided me through lockpicking/how it worked), lockpicking doesn't seem to be purely a mini-game. As I heard and understood from what Pete was telling me, the difficulty of being able to pick a lock does actually depend on your lockpick skill. I also talked to some crazy guy who worshipped a nuclear bomb. After browsing Megaton for a while I headed out to check out some combat.
First thing I fought was a bee. I picked VATS cause I loathe and am not very good at shooting in real-time games with a console controller (all stations of Fallout were running on the XBOX). Shot at the torso, racking up several pistol shots. Boom, Boom, Boom dead.
Long story short, next I walked down to a small destroyed city and went inside the super duper mart, shot at raiders, they shot back and I was killed by a raider w/machine gun. That was the end of my play trial.
------------
As a fan of F1,F2:
Well, did it feel like Fallout? No...yes...no....yes...well, see when you play the game you see things that are familiar. Vaultboy, the cave, the light, the vault door, mole rat, dean's electronics and a few other things that remind you of the first two games. Those kinds of things remind you that you're playing Fallout. However, the land, cities, people and even metagame aspects like the 3d graphics are just so foreign to the first two games that w/out those specific identifying factors from the first two games the game would not feel like Fallout in my opinion.
Combat:
I really, really loved turn-based combat in Fallout 1/2. It was one my favorite aspects of the game.
Of course, in Fallout 3, combat is nothing like it was in the first two games. The FPS is pretty much that. You aim and shoot. I'm pretty sure though, that statistics was involved despite it being real-time. I would shoot in real-time but it didn't seem like all bullets did damage despite shots being placed perfectly on the body.
VATS is real-time with pause. There was one thing that I wasn't clear about that worried me. It seemed like in FPS mode, you could shoot and shoot without stopping. In VATS, my AP would run out, I would have to go back to FPS mode to recharge AP and go back to VATS and do that over and over. It didn't seem like AP had any effect while in FPS mode.
Graphics:
Looked great. The wasteland looks devastatingly beautiful from what I saw in the demo. Even thought the same engine, graphics seem more polished than in Oblivion. I think it's more correct to say that the colors are richer. The wasteland had a palette of brown, yellow, and grayish tones. Bloom is horrible. Turn if off when you play the game. The models WILL remind you of Oblivion.
Dialogue:
*Read above* + my only gripe w/dialogue is that it seems like there is alot of cursing. I personally don't prefer a whole lot of it and it just seems like it has been inserted just for the sake of making it seem cool and gritty. No purpose to it, doesn't define characters. It's feels like it is used just because it exists.
Speculation:
Dungeons. From what I overheard Pete and Istvan talking w/others it seems like "dungeons" will be much better than what it was like in Oblivion. Unlike Oblivion's same looking random dungeons, it seems so called "dungeons" in Fallout 3 are specifically unique places such as super duper mart and springvale elementary. It seems each location has its unique design apart from the common waste/apocalyptic setting.
Bottom Line:
If you can't live w/out turn-based combat, isometric graphics, Mark Morgan and the soothing, barren flatness of the west coast wasteland you best steer clear of this game. You're not going to like it.
Is it the Fallout we know? Nope. Is it Oblivion w/guns? No, I don't think so. They changed things about this game in a way that it doesn't totally feel like a post-apoc Oblivion mod. If you don't mind and embrace changes, check it out. My personal feeling that I got from what I played is that it is going to be a fun game in its own right.
thefalloutfan
Where'd That 6th Toe Come From?
Thanks for your opinion, you were quite honest there.
From what I've seen/read, I think you are right. The fact that it is 3D and not always isometric (since you can play it ISO to explore) will give it a different feel - not that this is bad, since it's not bad for me, but it does make it look quite different.
All in all, I think this will be quite a good game. Good thing you said that they surely improved over their previous game. So....I'll leave bloom off
From what I've seen/read, I think you are right. The fact that it is 3D and not always isometric (since you can play it ISO to explore) will give it a different feel - not that this is bad, since it's not bad for me, but it does make it look quite different.
All in all, I think this will be quite a good game. Good thing you said that they surely improved over their previous game. So....I'll leave bloom off
First of all, thank you for taking the time to report. Information is always good to have even if it's bad news.
), but they gimped it back to Oblivion style where it just does less damage. This was reportedly done for the slower folks who just couldn't grasp that occult, arcane, esoteric and utterly foreign RPG concept of such things being governed by character skill rather than player skill. So there's no problem if your character sucks at using firearms, you won't have to worry about something unheard of like missing and hitting a different enemy or perhaps very unintentional bystander. I mean, fuck, you might hit a kid! And, holy shit, that would totally cramp the playing style of people who want to do things like start a firefight in a daycare center or on a playground and use their awesome FPS sniping/marksman skills for it.
Yay, Bethesda! Way to figure out how to get rid of those pesky consequences of action there and cater to the more clueless portions of the FPS crowd.
Reminds me of people who complain about letterboxed editions of movies because they don't understand what they're actually seeing.
Thank you again. Please, rest assured none of the shots were at you. You're a messenger of your own volition and I think you were fair enough.
Well, I could feign surprise there, but i won't.Plissken said:
That's about what I expected. Generic feel with shoe-horned iconography to say "Hey, it's Fallout, kids!"
Yeah, that had already been confirmed. Earlier they had it so you would actually miss if you... well, missed (can you imagine any such thing? where do they get those ideas?
), but they gimped it back to Oblivion style where it just does less damage. This was reportedly done for the slower folks who just couldn't grasp that occult, arcane, esoteric and utterly foreign RPG concept of such things being governed by character skill rather than player skill. So there's no problem if your character sucks at using firearms, you won't have to worry about something unheard of like missing and hitting a different enemy or perhaps very unintentional bystander. I mean, fuck, you might hit a kid! And, holy shit, that would totally cramp the playing style of people who want to do things like start a firefight in a daycare center or on a playground and use their awesome FPS sniping/marksman skills for it.Yay, Bethesda! Way to figure out how to get rid of those pesky consequences of action there and cater to the more clueless portions of the FPS crowd.
Reminds me of people who complain about letterboxed editions of movies because they don't understand what they're actually seeing.
Yes, someday maybe they'll find a big, strong man who can carry a PC into a convention/exhibition for them. Oooooh, they're so heavy and unwieldly. God save us from those big ol' 10 ton machines.
It's from the folks who apparently think that "violence is fucking funny!" and that 'dark humor' is defined as someone beheading some old lady and then pretending to have a conversation with the severed head. Go figure.
Well, that is good news. That's +1, but gets negated by the -1 of those copy/paste exterior house ruins we've seen sitting right next to each other.
Which would be encouraging if it was entitled Fun Game In Its Own Right 3.
Thank you again. Please, rest assured none of the shots were at you. You're a messenger of your own volition and I think you were fair enough.
thefalloutfan
Where'd That 6th Toe Come From?
I wouldn't argue over the PC/xbox thing though. It's much easier to bring an xbox along with you rather than a computer, MUCH easier.
Of course, I'd rather play the PC version, but undeniably the xbox is easy to take with you to different areas. Done it myself (with the PS2 though).
Of course, I'd rather play the PC version, but undeniably the xbox is easy to take with you to different areas. Done it myself (with the PS2 though).
Cow
First time out of the vault
It's seriously not that noticeable when you're actually playing the game. Besides those side-paneled suburban houses you saw in the videos, I never saw them again after leaving that area. I also didn't see architecture outside of the area it existed in meaning the game's buildings are probably unique to their area.
That one foobar aside, the game is actually quite variable in it's design.
EDIT: What time where you there plissken? I played the far left booth as you're looking in at 11:00am or so.
And if you went to the public showing, what prize did you get? I wanted that sock puppet so badly.