Things that Fallout 3 did right!

Austin Stricker said:
Rubble piles segmenting sections and having to travel via subway tunnels tricked you into perceiving the city as much larger than it actually is. I haven't played a ton of fallout 1 and 2, so I'm not sure if this idea is original to them (feel free to enlighten me, pals), but regardless I thoroughly enjoy this design choice.
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That's all Bethesda. Being an ol-schooler in this regard, I didn't find the tunnel-crawl aspect to fit very well with the genre (but now I am the one beating the dead horse)
The original games tried to give an impression of vast ruined cities in a less noticeable way - by having random encounter areas around city-based locations (usually one location with 3-4 areas) feature ruin and rubble. For example San Francisco is *one* location, with just 1 really urban area, one harbor area, and a couple of other more specialized areas not really featuring any city or ruin. This, to many, gave an impression of a very microscopic city. But, if you exit the location, and roam around the map, picking up random encounters, anywhere near-ish the city, these will take place inside rubble and ruin, indicating that the city continues this far out, and is populated by gangs and hostiles.
Any further out, and all these encounters will happen in wilderness.
 
Austin Stricker said:
Fallout 3 brought the fallout universe into the public eye again
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I see this as a big part of the problem. There are many games [and series; Fallout included] that have fallen out of mainstream fashion. No one contests that Bethesda would not have profited as much had they stuck to the proper format, and created a strategic turn based RPG with deep multi-branching dialog with several solutions for each major quest. Todd Howard himself recounts seeing their players click past the [boring] words of a detailed story, in search of who to shoot next. We get it, tastes have greatly deteriorated with the inclusive expansion of the mainstream audience; we live in the age of TLDR. :(

But this is what Fallout was notable for. They sold their game on the Fallout name, and delivered nothing indicative of that reputation. This is a case of 'Better not to do it at all, if you cannot do it right'. They have forever damaged the IP. Regardless of improved sales, it was still like trying to improve upon Vegemite by making it strawberry jam; yes, sugary jam sells better than salty yeast paste, but sugary jam should not be [disingenuously] sold as, or with a name that implies "improved" salty yeast paste.

The name "Fallout 3" implies an outstanding [and turn based] RPG, not an FPS franken-shooter/RPG-lite like the one we got.
 
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Austin Stricker said:
Fallout 3 brought the fallout universe into the public eye again, and for younger fallout fans like myself(currently 19), this was the first fallout game I ever had the pleasure of playing and I'm thankful it provided me with this opportunity.

I think design wise, Bethesda did a great job of making DC feel like an actual huge city. Rubble piles segmenting sections and having to travel via subway tunnels tricked you into perceiving the city as much larger than it actually is. I haven't played a ton of fallout 1 and 2, so I'm not sure if this idea is original to them (feel free to enlighten me, pals), but regardless I thoroughly enjoy this design choice.
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Agreed that DC sometimes feels big (and sometimes not at all), something that doesn't work quite as well with New Vegas. Vegas feels like a village, that you can circle around in a few minutes. But DC doesn't always feel big and it doesn't feel it was nuclearly destroyed, and the way people and wilderness invested the place don't feel believable either.
 
WTF
You know you are on a website which gathers a community of Fallout & and rpg fans who liked when the series used to make sense ?

That comment would make much more sense if we were talking about Mario Kart. But that series never pretended to make sense or gathered a community of people who cared about that.
 
naossano said:
WTF
You know you are on a website which gathers a community of Fallout & and rpg fans who liked when the series used to make sense ?

That comment would make much more sense if we were talking about Mario Kart. But that series never pretended to make sense or gathered a community of people who cared about that.
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He was being ironical.
I like your posts, naossano, but you have a tendency to miss out on several occasions of irony :]
 
naossano said:
Agreed that DC sometimes feels big (and sometimes not at all), But DC doesn't always feel big
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I feel as though DC is a decent size. It's placement in the corner of the map seems like a good design choice honestly. Putting it there gives the illusion that more city exists that we don't see, something Fallout 1 did with towns and their crops rather well.
 
Areas in Fallout 1&2 were [also] abstractions. The Vaults housed 1000 residents; the levels wouldn't have been to scale, nor just have had more than the few that we saw, but rather the whole level is an abstraction of what would have been. Same for New Reno and the Hub. One could argue the same for FO3, but their intent seems to be just a scaled down slice of the land. They put far too much detail in FO3, and so its shortcomings were jarring, and as a result far too noticeably apparent; where a lighter touch could have made it easier for the player to fill out the gaps and omissions of game world on their own.

IE. FO3 should not have tried to put the player in the Fallout game world, where they are not (,and should not be) invited. The Isometric style allows for a greater level of acceptable abstraction than FPP; and they needed it to pull off the Fallout world setting.

This is why the FO3 setting is kooky; it is because the proper Fallout setting is vast, and grim as hell, and not very fun in the first person. The dark humor (that FO3 is missing) serves to lighten the oppressiveness of the setting; which is already abstracted at that. It would be depressing to play a faithful 1:1 remastering of Fallout 1 or 2 in FPP sans abstraction, even if done in the Unreal Engine. I doubt I could tolerate it all the way through.

*My point being that making it tolerable in FPP requires a mutually exclusive detrimental change to the world setting and gameplay mechanics. This is why FO3 & 4 are not good Fallout games.
 
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Great post @Gizmojunk.

However, I must add that similar problem exists in FNV. It's not as jarring as in FO3 because devs tried to make a logical setting (not to mention a more "fallouty" one), as well as trying to "centralize" the focal point of the game - Vegas itself - to a relatively small but preserved piece of the world surrounded by bombed out ruins, which are surrounded by desert.
Unfortunately, that didn't work out all that well either. Vegas still feels very...unnatural. Nothing breaks immersion more when you know your IRL neighborhood is bigger than one of the biggest and most prosperous cities in the wastes. So much for FPP...
 
I don't think that's so much FPP's fault, more like it's the engine's fault. And time constraints and budget. New Vegas with the right game engine, timeline, large enough budget and the know how could theoretically be the size of GTA V's Los Santos. Barring the level of detail LS has though, the NPC systems along with massive environment details may cause some strain. Granted I'm not a game developer, I'm just tossing out ideas.
 
I'm the extreme minority in this, but I do not have a problem with Gamebryo. When FO3 was announced, I hadn't heard of Bethesda before, and so I bought Oblivion to see what they were capable of [in-house]. I was initially VERY impressed, and was eying their customized engine for suitability to a Fallout title. What I saw was that they already had many systems in place that could just be renamed. Gamebryo had been used for 3D/isometric style games before. [Kohan2, and Loki]

I was certainly looking forward to it; until the first screenshots began to surface. I had been anticipating a game built upon the foundations of Fallout 2, and not a plastered over version of Oblivion, (which by then, I had discovered to be shockingly shallow and repetitive; but wonderful to look at). I do believe that they could have produced a game whose in-game visuals matched the original game's rendered cutscenes... To have the the Harold in-game character model BE a fully formed version from the earlier game's dialog head, and to see the BOS (and remnant Enclave) strutting around in the original cutscene armors.
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To have Fallout 2 style conversations where the entire polygon budget was spent on the lip-synced close up head. To talk to someone face to face ~Fallout 1&2 style, but with 3D graphics on par with the Nvidia face demo of the day.
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Needless to say, FO3 was a really harsh disappointment. Fallout was unusual [among other reasons] for its detailed talking heads. I cannot recall a single contemporary RPG that did similar ~outside of Wastland/Bard's Tale, and Gold Box series... All pre-1994 and not reactive or lipsynced. And yet Bethesda paid not the slightest attention to this unique and noteworthy feature of the IP.

**It occurs that KotOR 1&2 kind of did have this.

While it has quirks (and has frustrated me first hand when modding), my only real issue with Bethesda's Gamebryo, is how they chose to use it with FO3 & 4.

:oops: I just realized the thread is about what FO3 did well, rather than wrong... And to that I can only (repeat) that it did a fine job landscaping the world to look the part. What there is of the environment looks spot on.
 
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