How should an RPG be? Freeroam for ever like Fallout 3?

Fallout 3's quests are overall substantially identical in quality to Fallout 1&2, ... in that those games had more/way more "generic" dungeon crawls, monster/rat cave filler, and linear fetch quests than some fans want to admit (witch did send you from location to location a lot in F2, but not so much in F1 )... but there were a few stand-outs that are noticeably more sophisticated than anything in Fallout 3.

Fallout 2 has ~95-100 quests and half of then are fetch quests.

F3 follows the F1 route in the there are less locations and they are smaller and are or feel more separated like islands, as opposed to the "organs of a body" approach of F2.
What it takes from F2 is the go here and then go there approach.

I'm not here to bash F1 and F2, just to point out that there not the perfect/so much better/flawless things some point them out to be compared to F3.


"empty rusted fusion/electric cars exploding into radioactive mushroom clouds. Or electricity from unmaintained generators that have been sitting there for 230 years. Or friendly people while everyday life is scavenging to survive."


How's that any different from the previous Fallout games ?!
A 200 year old plus working car and 200+ years working computers ?!

How could people survive in a Vault for over 150+ years when the water chip (and every other machine) would fail/degrade/cease to work a lot sooner ?!

They don't make water chips like they used now do they ?!

And how old was that G.E.C.K. in Fallout 2 ?!

Why would those people chose to live in locations that have so no defense natural or man made and that could easily fall to an attack ?!
And if they see me with a Power Armour and some powerful weapon(s) why don't they at least show some respect ?!


And for that matter how would humans even survive a nuclear apocalypse ?!

 

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Fallout 3 quests, were in my opinion , of lower quality then in the previous fallouts. The idiotic "survival guide" quests are good examples. And the fetch quests at least didn't feel like fetch quests. They made sense. and i really dont remember there being lot of em. I went to den, sure i needed vic's radio, but it made sense. Unlike fallout 3s quests. " collect random crap for the sake of collecting"

as for the working computers , they were in plausible places, in working vaults, military bases and fairly advanced settlemets. I didnt see any working computers in junktown or klamath or den. I dont remember that there were many working computer in Hub either. No computers in the middle of nowhere unmaintained, or in places that made no sense.
And vaults were made to survive long time, and the dwellers were most likely taught how to repair/manufacture parts. In fallout 2 most vaults have been abandoned, and vault 13 is one of the few that is being used. And i suspect that most of the malfunctions were on done PURPOSE as vault-tec intended them to be more social experiments than safe locations. The necropolis vault is a good example.

People used vaults. thats how they survived. Few people who were outside survived and are mostly mutated to ghouls. Of course there would be rural areas that wouldnt be as important, so thats another way.

The car was just a small extra, i think it could have worked as it had almost very few electronic parts.and there was someone who scavenged the parts for it. ( the car commercial anyone ?)

Its all about INTERNAL realism lad, not realism.

 

Actually hero of F2 son of vault dweller from f1 gouse back in time and destroys the water chip so our hero from f1 gets kicked from vault so kids use condoms

 

Cubans have working americans cars from fifties despite the humid climate and lack of spare parts and Fallout California is dry desert ideal for conservation of metal so I can say: They don't make them like they used now.
One car in all north Cali was not far fetched but working computers in every d... buliding and tunel were.

 

Actually they don't. The only thing original on nearly all of them is the body. The engine and drive train have been replaced with Soviet-made engines and drive trains.

As far as RPGs go, Fallout 3 doesn't compare to GTA-San Andreas or the newly released GTA IV. I think Rockstar did a much better job in creating an interesting free roaming world along with quests.

 

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^ I'm not trolling, just pointing that no amount of fanboy talk will fill the holes in Fallout 1 and 2 and make them perfect, not logic.

And no amount of maintainance would make 200 year old machines work, or their water-chips. You need to manufacture replacement parts or new machines altogether. I ain't seen any waterchip manufacturing plant still working in Fallout 1 BTW.
Also humanity would not survive a massive nuclear fallout to begin with, nor would they be turned into anything else but corpses.

 

GTA IV meh not so, but San Andreas indeed has some RPG elements that surpass anything found in any Fallout game.

 

Interesting you bring that up. Wasn't the entire plot of Fallout 1 to get a water chip because the one in your vault BROKE DOWN?

Thats not necessarily true. There has been no consensus on what would *actually* happen in the case of nuclear warfare. Nuclear winter, human extinction, and all those are untested theories at best.

 

After almost 200 year it broke down, actually was "programed" to brake down.

 

Ok...did you really say that ? i mean did you mean it ? I played san andreas, and i have to say that is incorrect. san andreas has only one ending, and thats it. its sandbox crime game, not an rpg.Its RPG elements limit to hitting people with baseball bats. By your logic i could call CoD4 an RPG. Since you can kill people in it.

Oh and you obviously didn't read my previous post. Oh well.

It is possible for humanity to survive with the vaults.

 

I thought Vault 13 was the control group and that the failure was actually an unfortunate accident?

 

As unetchical it might be for a first post on these fora to be a critical one, this could not be further removed from the truth.

Lets divide the affected population into four groups. Group A is closest to the atomic blast, and gets incinerated or toherwise killed on spot by the thermobaric effects. Group B recieves a high enough dose of radiation (typically above 8 Gray), to get radiation sickness, and die either on spot from truly massive exposure (though that wolud require more than 100 Gy, as in such cases, your brain gets fried, to put in very simply), or die later due to organ failoure and over-infections (medical facilities would be quite non-exsistent, and by the rule of triage, a severe radiation sickness is the last thing on the list). Group C receives enough radiation for the stochastic effects to set in, aka they are very likely to get cancer. This concludes groups that were directly affected by the blast, aka the cities population, or a good part of it. Group D is those people who move in afterwards, and, if they have enough brains and a priori knowledge, stay away from steel structures (Co-60 is a bitch). Now, they fall between GB and GC, and again, some of them do survive.

As for the next generations. Hirosima and Nagasaki have shown us that there is little-to-none genetic effect for a high dose-low exposure combination, aka, the citizens of Hirosima do not have three heads and thick winter fur.

Of course, the wolrd of Fallout was saturated with bombs, and a nuclear winter/summer must have set in, along with radioactive, and highly poisonous (due to the heavy metals) dust is abound, but this still does not mean that _everybody dies_. Life expectancy will drop, possibly severely, and the average human may get weaker due to a number of factors (again, natural selection may take care of that), but humanity is a very efficient pest on Earth, and can not be erradicatede without killing everything that is left.

Excuse my bad typing, english is not my first language, and I am currently quite sick.

Actually, there are no real indications that a high-intensity, but very quick dose exposure (as in, an actomic explosion) has

 

I don't know if that's really fair. FO3 definitely has much more content than FO1, and much of the non-questing content comes in the form of dungeons to explore, but if you just look at the quests, there's less contrast. FO had its own dungeons in the main quest (outside Vault 13, Vault 15, beneath the Necropolis, and Mariposa) and quests that involved killing raiders or deathclaws. There's probably more action in the FO3 quests, but I don't consider any of the games to be dungeon crawlers (unless you choose to play them that way).

 

You gotta admit that GTA has far more roleplay than something like Diablo Its essentially a sandbox game though. And the missions (cant call them quests) are not even the main strength of the game.


Oh and please, dont focus on this 'realism' nitpicking crap. Its a fiction, you just accept some things as 'real' for the alternative world of the game. It just have to be consistent.

 

There may be less "big" locations, but they are so close to one another, that any kind of isolation feeling is gone. The world feels very chaotic and incoherent.

Really? What has F3 done better than F1 and F2? The main quest is crap, the writing is crap, the animations are crap, the combat is crap, the graphics might be the only thing where F3 has an edge, but some of the artwork was better, more consistent with the setting in the original Fallouts.

How? Are you kidding? There is one running car (which you have to fix first) in the whole game and a bunch of scrapheap, while in F3 that scrapheap suddenly has some magical, explosive qualities which are beyond idiotic even in a game.

Maintenance?

Hundreds of reasons. Why do people in third world countries live in locations that have no natural or man made defence?

Agreed. Although you can't add everything to the game, a bit more flexible, responding behaviour would be nice.

 

I think it would be interesting to do a genuinely even-handed comparison here. I guess it would depend on what you think a dungeon crawl technically involves, but I don't remember that much more forced dungeon crawling in FO3's main quest. If you are going to count the overworld map travel, then all three of the games have dungeon crawling just to get from point A to point B.

 

Inside the ruined buildings, and underground subways are dungeons crawls in FO3