NMA: Capital Wasteland: Revelation review

Yeah, I guess. It just bothers me that buildings pop up right in front of me when from a distance I thought there was nothing there. Plus I get shot at and can't even spot an enemy unless i get closer.

 

Yeah bethesda has trouble optimizing games, which is strange considering the low texture modeling.

I thought the review was spot on. There were parts I liked about fallout 3, but a lot of the same mistakes bethesda kept making really bogged it down.

The Outcasts were kinda cool. The glitches can be downright horrifying(literally)

 

I have no problem believing you'd take pleasure in capping Moira in reloading but I find it difficult to believe you could play through this slop a second time.

I can barely manage my first play though and it's just painful. I feel compelled to finish and it's taking up most of my free time and I will probably finish off the main plot tommorrow. I'm just tying up loose ends now and visiting areas I've missed only to see if there's anything worth the time I'm wasting playing the crap. So far anything I've actually managed to stoke myself into thinking is interesting has been ruined by the craptastic way Bethesda has mismanaged it. At this point I figure I just keep playing to figure out how many crevices they filled and with what in morbid fascination after I learned how badly they raped my favorite highschool girlfriend.

I agree with most of your article but disagree that this is at all a good game. In any sense.

It's pretty mediocre for an rpg even considering most one path japanese rpgs that get ported over here, and it's a horrendous shooter. The plot is abyssmal and it's set whole new lows for technical readiness. Frankly if there was any government regulation of the industry or if consumers were less lazy these days there would probably be class action lawsuits over being sold an obviously defective product.

I haven't been paying attention but if this is at all a game of the year contender there must have been a true dearth of games this year. Hello Kitty Island Adventures or Math Blasters must be the only other nominees.

I agree that the attention to detail of most games and rpgs in particular was far and away better a decade ago but it's not like it's so completely absent these days that Bethesda's mediocre quest design here is anything refreshing or at all groundbreaking. I take it you aren't a Bioware fan but I myself use them as a great example of possibly the only developer to consistently maintain high standards and stay successful doing so. Black Isle, Troika, and now Obsidian picking up thier pieces maintain the same standards but aren't always so successful hence you gotta find what banner the guys are working under when you try to look them up for current projects. Still Bioware has changed things up with most of it's different releases and has the balls to develope and maintain it's own properties, which few do these days, as well as taking great care in doing a good job and staying true to other peoples intellectual property. Hell, I was playing paper and pen AD&D way back when and was upset when Gygax got drummed out of TSR, and thought the old Baldur's Gate's made great use of my favorite game world. Later I thought Bioware showed more love to the Star Wars franchise with Knights of the Old than Lucas managed to drum up for his own property when he spit out his new episodes.

I do agree with you that there were glimpses that they could have actually made something good. Mainly when you actually got the box, at least the CE, and opened it up. I'll at least give them points for packaging, I probably had a good 45 minutes of hope playing with all the doodads they put in and the general look and feel of the booklets I got. Kinda faded if you actually read any of their crap, but in terms of appearance it was pretty steller and I had some hope for the game up until it finished installing and I got rushed right out of the vault with little impact. An intro geared towards button mashers I guess.

I always figured Bethesda tried with Oblivion, they didn't really deliver, but I'd have given them points for trying and they left enough room for a really dedicated modding community to move in and pick up the slack. With Fallout it really doesn't even seem like they've even tried. Even with parts of the game that could have been cool like Tranquility Lane they just couldn't find any consistant theme or goal to hang onto and everything ends up shallow. I just keep wandering and 'exploring' in this supposedly free world with it permanent easy mode swithed on and trying to find something worthwhile, but it seems that every remotely interesting plot point is left either underdeveloped or undeveloped. I've found so many mentions of something that could be curious or cool, but there was absolutely no way to investigate further. You're just left with so many dissapointingly empty locations with no reason at all to find or visit them.

All in all it's just a bad game.

Even removing the fact that it's needlessly milking a franchise, or more accurately dressing it up in highheels and fishnets and workign it on a corner, it's just not a good game.

If it was at least a good shooter, that would be something. It's not. It's not really anything. It's a bad game that can't figure out what it wants to be. They tossed in it seems every random idea that occured to them, whether it belonged there or not, and it shows - because more often than not it didn't belong. A lot of that can be made up with gameplay though, and it's not there. The intricacy of the special system is lost. Perks are largely superflous. There are few real consequences for choices which largely shows as all the poor dialog drones together and gets you to the same place regardless.

I don't know, I'm thinking it's in the garbage class of quality.

I'm not sure how the structure of it's quest design raise it to the level of 'good' in the hope that others will emulate that part of it's design. I think there are a lot better games out there in terms of quest design that aren't quite so lackluster.

Most of the quests I've played through, and I think I've found them all at this point, have an extremely illogical thought pattern to them. Most make no real since and are slanted with only a few ways to do them. In most you can skip steps and there are many obvious routes that I think most people would think of and prefer to take for the quests only to lack the options to do so. Most NPCs give dialog options considering you to have taken other routes than you did as part of their normal parse and ratehr than being morally ambiguous many quests have pretty clear karmic pluses or minuses and often for some nonsensical reasons.

Couple spoiler examples/

[spoiler:883a825257]The Tenpenny Towers quest. I myself am by nature more white knight than black so my personal preference upon hearing the whole story in Tenpenny would be to resolve the quest peacefully by getting the ghouls to stop harrassing the tower and find someplace else to live. I was actually surprised that wasn't at all an option. You go visit the ghoul and he seems quite a psychopath that I think his own followers mention may be close to turning feral. He wants into Tenpenny tower largely cause it's there and he wants the sweet life inside of it and feels perfectly justified in forcing his way in and taking it. Even as a good guy I found nothing at all redeemable about the guy that screamed, hey, I should talk the Tower into letting the guy live there. Pretty much every dialog option I looked for ended up with the guy attacking me and my losing karma defending myself. Oh frigging well, I happily plugged him. I was less happy to plug his two friends, who seemed ok in my book and who I wouldn't have minded letting into the tower if they weren't following the lead of a violant nutcase.

I think I went the good guy route regardless and yet Three Dogs looped news still likes to call me a scumbag everytime it loops though, yay, for killing those poor ghouls yadda yadda.

Now looking online later and learning that even if I talked them into the tower they would have killed everyone and I'm not really surprised. It sure seems like Bethesda ascribes to the Dark Helmet believe the Good is Dumb. I mean I may be good, but that doesn't mean I'm a socialist and everything belongs to everyone and should be shared. Give me other options.

Another quest involves another ghoul in Underworld, Mr. Crowley. Brilliant. Go cap off or get the keys from folks on his hitlist, fine. I suppose that has a killer or talker route. Yay. Lets say I want to be clever at that point and learn that the keys are for a treasure in some abandoned military base at the same time. Yay. I can go get use the keys and then give them to the unsuspecting Crowley right?

Wrong. He magically knows I used the keys to unlock the military base. No being clever for you, no. We'll just call it quest complete when you get into the base and psychically alert everyone involved.[/spoiler:883a825257]

I don't know, maybe I'm dense, maybe I expect too much and am spoiled because some other people actually live up to my expectations, but I can't see anything particularly great about Beth's quest design or it's 'structure'. Is it better than Oblivions? Maybe, probably, can't remember Oblivions anymore to be sure. Don't really care though, doesn't make it good or turn an otherwise lackluster game into something to emulate.

I don't know how old Witcher is and don't care enough to look, but I picked it up to play last month for something to do. One of the early quests has you decide whether to opose or ignore an angry mob led by murderers, rapists, and basically reprehensible characters as they attempt to burn to death a witch who's a member of a cult that uses human sacrifice, who freely sells poisons, who most likely manipulated a man into killing his brother with a doll of him she keeps in her house, and who'll sleep with you to get you to defend her. Now there's a morally ambiguous choice between which is the lesser of two evils.

Beth could learn something about putting actual choices in a game, and maybe even adding in some consequences to them. Biggest consequence in FO3 seems to be which of two towns you get an alter for you bobbleheads.

Moral complexity is evidently far too hard for them, and I don't really fault them for it, not their fault they can't manage it. I also can't fault them for failing to see the biggest tenet from the original Fallouts was man's ability and desire to survive, and to strive to do so against all odds. Instead they get into this whole sacrifice for everyone else dealio that's just out of place, but that's ok too I never really expected them to grasp it and wasn't surprised. The sexual humor written by and for 12 year olds, I do hold against them, though. If you can't handle sexual content, don't include it at all. The various NPCs you meet that start out my aren't you a stud and end with no I won't sleep with you even when you don't ask and aren't interested is kinda another pointless and repititious annoyance, but again can be forgiven by button mashing through most of the pointless dialogue they labor to heap on you. Much the same with taking a throw away line from Harold in FO1 that he called the tree growing out of his head Herbert instead of Bob and then bludgeoning you to death with it in 3 like it actually meant something and you need to be told about it over and over and over again until you actually do want to kill him just to shut him up as much as Moira. You can button mash through that too to get back to the gameplay... but the gameplay just isn't there to be fun. It's just not a good game even forgiving the fractured badly written plot and poorly utilized franchise.

It's just a bad game, and I was actually wishing it'd at least be fun to shoot people in it for more than you know an hour or two till the head severing gets repetitious and dull.