Three more The Pitt screenshots

No, I meant how long have you been playing Fallout 3, because for me it got worse and worse, ending in a stunning crescendo of horribleness.

I had fun for the first 10 hours or so, after that all the faults got more and more obvious, which caused me to start comparing it to previous Fallouts (I avoided doing this from the start), which made me ever more critical of this tripe.
 
Oh, I get you. Let me quote from my review:

Unfortunately this is one of those few stories that has a great beginning and culminates in a lackluster ending (...) Despite the many ways one can live their life in the wasteland there is really only a couple of endings to this tale with additional footnotes based on choices you have made. And this ending comes so abruptly and anticlimactically that it has left pretty much every player I have spoken to confused and wanting more.
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http://www.theconnoisseurs.com/fallout3.html

I love the game at first, then I thought the entire thing was broken when I found my first bug, given my experience with Oblivion. After that I didint find any more game breaking bugs so I was fine. Then I finished the game and I was angry. Now I just walk around and explore, and with the mods that add more weapons and creatures I am LOVING the exploration aspect.



So yeah, for sure I've put 40+ hours into it which I rarely do with a game, spread out amongst 4 or 5 characters.

Fortunately, outside of the main story, the game world contains a huge amount of non-essential content, by which I mean locations and events that don’t tie into the plot but instead serve as backdrops for the character to have their own unique experience. This includes abandoned baseball parks, half sunken fishing boats filled with beers, gutted 50’s style dinners, and deserted tourist traps. Maybe while you are exploring you might get attacked by raiders and mutated animals, or maybe you will just be left alone to contemplate the silent skeletal remains of post nuclear war America. This sense of place is of course much more heavily accentuated during the scripted encounters that take place at such scenic locales such as the Jefferson Memorial and the Museum of Natural History. These places retain enough of their former glory to make you wish you had a working camera but they are also bombed out enough to give you some Planet of the Apes style chills as you see monuments in ruins.
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And to save you the time of reading my review the thing that bugs me the most is the KARMA system, I have played as a complete psychotic and still come out rated as an angel because I dont kill civilians all day.
 
I found exploring also lacking. Nothing you find ties into any story arc, has no effect on anything, and in and of itself is not particularly interesting. It exemplifies Bethesda's approach to game design. Everything is specular, instance-based. It simply does not come together as a whole in any way.

Another thing, there wasn't a single instance in this game that made me go "Wow, that's really clever!" None. At. All.

This alone is enough to make me qualify this game as a non-Fallout game.
 
Compared to the real exploring RPGs, like the Gothic series, I'd say Fallout fell rather short, but it's still decent.
 
The first 10 hours of Fallout 3 was amazing. Then suddenly, once I had reached the level cap and explored Factory Building #100, a thought crept in to my mind; "What is the point?"

The exploration is hollow and holds no reward. Criticize The Glow all you want to, but The Glow by itself is a more rewarding game than all of Fallout 3. They build this huge hollow world. It looks pretty, but none of it is connected. You can totally skip vast areas of the game map and will have missed nothing.

It's like they have a great environment building team that knows how to make a huge game world, but their team that handles adding quests, NPC's, and things to find just go for the most simple lowest common denominator crap they can think of.

Seriously, the quests in Fallout 3 SUCK. A town with two super hero wannabe's? Come on... A slaver town in a world with no caravans, farms, or any use for slaves? A cyborg that disguises himself as a cop? The whole hinted subplot about the Commonwealth and their androids... Great, look forward to androids and more crap in Fallout 4.

You can criticize Fallout 1 and 2's graphics all you want, but Fallout fans have never been graphics whores. The only reason many of us are hard on the graphics now is because for Bethesda it's their biggest selling point. We were told for about two years how crappy the orignial games looked, and how much more "immersive" their game world would be. They rambled off about how detailed everything would be because they weren't relying on old outdated tech to do the job. Fast foward to the final product and we see that in trade for a robust world that made logical sense, we got a "pretty" world that was dumbed down beyond recognition. And to top it all off, they didn't get the look right for the most part. The game doesn't look like a sundered world that has sat idle for 200 years.

The first games were set up with some logical consistency. There were farmers in towns, there were caravans to move goods around to various towns, and there were slavers and raiders that preyed upon the caravans. For all of their talk of immersion they certainly ruined the "immersive" world created in the first two. Now there are no farmers. Caravans are now 1 person and a brahmin, apparently able to defend themselves from the landscape completely littered by generic "raiders" that don't seem to have any point to their existence. The slavers just stay in their town with their pen full of slaves doing nothing.

I didn't want Fallout 3 to be a top down isometric game. I wanted it to be a good game... Bethesda has proven that they don't "get it". So forgive me if I see orange screenshots with Feral Ghoul 2.0, billowing smoke stacks, and a circular saw, and just shake my head and mumble obscenities about how badly off the rails Bethesda has taken the game.
 
DexterMorgan said:
No, I meant how long have you been playing Fallout 3, because for me it got worse and worse, ending in a stunning crescendo of horribleness.

I had fun for the first 10 hours or so, after that all the faults got more and more obvious, which caused me to start comparing it to previous Fallouts (I avoided doing this from the start), which made me ever more critical of this tripe.
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The game is just a big 'why am I doing this' exercise for me. The very beginning was ok, but since I knew what to expect from beth I knew that initial micro burst of pseudo immersion wouldn't last (and it didn't). The best part about it is the graphics IMO but what's insanely ironic is that the graphics really aren't that great!!!! LMAO! (or cry). So you have this bizarre paradox that is so insane it's really indescribable by me. For the life of me I cannot see the interest in collecting hordes of loot and throwing it in your "house" or whatever the hell it is that the kids like to do these days.

But back to my point 'why am I playing this?' is now what the "experience" is for me. Why I am STILL trying to play it (very sporadically) is in hopes of being able to mod it into something Ican half way enjoy. But since I'm not a master modder I cannot do everything I want to so I'm left frustrated and angry.
 
You're going to have to qualify that remark. 200 years in, background radiation would long since have faded
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This is 100% WRONG because radiation in the Fallout setting doesn't operate along the same rules as radiation in the real world. I keep seeing people here saying, "X isn't realistic because Y would happen in the real world" yet in the Fallout Bible it clearly states that the "rules" of the Fallout setting are not those of the real world, but those that people in the 50's imagined they would be.

I'm sick to death of people citing real world science and laws to back up their views on how for example "radiation wouldn't be everywhere" and how "background radiation would have faded" when clearly in Fallout 2 and 3 it hasn't. This is because the rules are not the same! What is realistic FOR YOU is irrelevant because the Fallout world doesn't operate along real world laws! Of course the steel mill can fixed and made to run quite easily! SCIENCE! is optimistic! Its easier to build things! its easier to construct things! Power is usually atomic and so the mill is unlikely to be using conventional means like burning shit to run. Any agriculture would be severely affected by radiation of course; it usually is, hence the "plants of dark soul" and the extreme difficulty of growing crops in many places.

In the Fallout world radiation is quite severe, a hell of a lot more severe, and its a lot more long-lasting. Its also ubiquitous and can cause all sorts of drastic mutations and fucked up creatures and effects on the world.

The Fallout Universe isn't meant to be what people in 2009 would expect the future to be, and its not meant to be realistic. Inserting modern-day attitudes and modern scientific knowledge on these topics doesn't add to 'verisimilitude', it fucks it up majorly.

From Fallout Bible 9. Highlighted the relevant parts in particular:

The Fallout world is much like Torg - physics and natural laws are not the same as in our universe, but are based instead on 50s sensibilities and pulp era comics - the Fallout universe is what people in the 50s believed the future would be (with a lot of nuclear warheads dropped on it). As a result, there are endless stretches of desert, radiation will cause giant mutations, rayguns and brains in jars are realities, you might trip over a few giant evil tentacular blobs with plans of taking over the world, see plenty of clunky robots with glass dome heads and lots of blinking lights, and science in general is not only heavily atomic and optimistic, but it is also much easier in the Fallout universe (or also, "Science!") thus allowing people to create ultrasound guns, death beams, and lasers, usually in little or no time (especially when an invasion from outer space occurs). Most modern day concepts concerning artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and so on aren't part of the Fallout universe, since people in the 50s didn't recognize that many of these concepts existed (well, except the terminology for artificial intelligence, which was officially used at the Dartmouth Summer Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956, if I have my facts straight).
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I'm sick to death of people citing real world science and laws to back up their views on how for example "radiation wouldn't be everywhere" and how "background radiation would have faded" when clearly in Fallout 2 and 3 it hasn't. This is because the rules are not the same! What is realistic FOR YOU is irrelevant because the Fallout world doesn't operate along real world laws! Of course the steel mill can fixed and made to run quite easily! SCIENCE! is optimistic! Its easier to build things! its easier to construct things! Power is usually atomic and so the mill is unlikely to be using conventional means like burning shit to run. Any agriculture would be severely affected by radiation of course; it usually is, hence the "plants of dark soul" and the extreme difficulty of growing crops in many places.
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Actually, there wasn't much radiation in Fallout 1 and 2. In fact, Tim Cain himself stated that they set the game a whooping 80 years after the Great War so that there wouldn't be much radiation anymore, but so that its results in the form of mutations would be everywhere.
 
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