@101 Avilan

This happens at the END of the game, not the middle. RPGs are supposed to ratchet up the challenge commensurate with the power of the player. Hell, all games are supposed to challenge the player on all stages. Sure, you’re wielding a zweihander with disturbing efficiency and can bank trickshots with your dual pistols with laughable ease, but they’re also sending more guys after you and putting you in more difficult situations.

Fallout 3 does do SOME modicum of NPC leveling – the raiders that were carrying pistols will carry assault rifles after you level – but they’re still just as easy to kill!

As for the Arefu brahmin magically being replaced, surely you see that handwave for just what it was? How can we take the economy seriously if there is no, well, scarcity?

You know, on the subject of those “eeevil” rich people, I think that Bethesda missed the importance of resource centralization in the Wasteland. Think about it – this is a situation in which we are supposed to rebuild humanity. How is that going to happen if there are no concentration points of resources (ie. “wealth”)? If all you have is a bunch of people scattered around with roughly the same impoverished state, no one will have enough to support any large infrastructure projects.

And honestly, that goes into something that was really missing from a setting which was supposed to be 200 years after the war. There should have been some infrastructure by then. It would have been really interesting to see some basic manufacturing going on or maybe some quests which involved you helping the people of the Wasteland to build up a better economy.

@92 Nalano

Man, you have got a “solid brass Balzac.” ;)

That’s it exactly. If people think that wealth is only generated dishonestly, soon all wealthy people will become dishonest, because social behavior tends to meet societal expectations.

Peace.

Shamus, the game actually does explicitly explain the difference that makes a feral ghoul.

Essentially: Brain damage, radiation damage to their brains makes them go feral. It’s painfully simple and perhaps not too appealing an explanation but it makes enough sense to appease my curiosity.

There are a couple conversations I’ve had in the game that explained that. One of them, I think, is actually in the very quest line you’re talking about here.

It strikes me that the best solution semi-possible is for you to seal the ways roy knows about that would let him in without an invitation, then maybe try talking the locals into letting the other ghouls in.

It also strikes me that it would have been nice if you could blow up somewhere clearly bad with the megaton nuke. Like, say, lead a commando raid to free the slaves from the slave-trade center, then blow it up. Or maybe moved it somewhere else where it could be securely held for such a use without threatening civilian lives. I mean, it’s basically capable of getting rid of any target you can get it to, and disarming it is clearly more difficult than much of anyone can manage, so if you need to dispose of a raider group too powerful to simply walk in and shoot, it’s a good thing to have.

Yes, it might get misused. Then again, so might the weapons-grade plutonium in the bomb, so you haven’t really disposed of it unless you lock the materials in a lead-lined vault and pour concrete on it. For that matter, it’s likely that other unexploded bombs exist and having one is a secure area instead of having to worry that the next crazy may find an ancient weapon design document and the radioactive materials that you left laying around is good. If it never gets used, that’s actually good in many ways.

1. Nowhere got nuked flat
2. It never needed to be used, which says good things about the overall political situation
3. the good guys still have a fully armed and operational weapon to convince everyone else that pushing them too far is a very bad idea.

Strap explosives to it and set them to go off over 30 seconds, and you can get the good ending for the basic quest when the right detonator is pushed.

What bugs me the most about the economy is that there’s only a few people in the game world (the doctors in most towns and the chemists in Rivet City) who are producing RadAway. RadAway should be to FO3 what water was to FO1; a commodity so vital and limited that the people who control its supply (or who can cure radiation by other means; again, doctors) are inordinately powerful. A non-ghoul-human eating a regular diet of the local cuisine would sicken and die from radiation poisoning in less than a year, even faster if they didn’t have access to clean water. The doctors and chemists should be the linchpin of their communities, not just another one of the services offered in town.

I know that Moira mixes up a radiation-flushing potion for you after one of the guide quests, but that’s treated as if it’s the first time she’s ever made it. Of course, keeping with the tight, tight plot and fully realized world, it’s never mentioned again.

I completed this mission with the massacre of residents, I spoke with them and ended up getting sick of his convictions. Decided to stop them. That hero that everyone talks about not convinced me, he is more a colonialist with his “faithful” slave to the side.

I think we should leave aside notions of right and wrong, in a reality where there are no more governments, organizations and societies, the concept of right and wrong, which is very concerning, nor should be raised.

Besides, karma is much more than a law on what action is a good and bad to be done. Refers to the consequences of those actions.

Heh, at first I thought it was someone else too, but I laughed more than usual at the jokes, especially the first panel, which seemed down right Penny-Arcade-esque (at least their TV Reporter guy they had).

Oops, that post of mine was meant for the stolen pixels thing.

Oh well

Soo….

Fallout 3 is arguably my greatest disappointment in the fourteen years I have been playing video-games.

The main quest is the definition of an idiot-plot. There are three main forces at work in the game, the Enclave, your father, and the Brotherhood of Steel. None of these groups have a believable motivation for their actions in the game, actions for which they are willing to both kill and die for.

In order for the farcical plot to take place every single character in the game has to be a complete idiot.

The best part, by far, is the very end.

Anyone not interested in spoilers feel free to skip the rest of this post.

<>

You are given the choice to save your life or the life of Paladin Lyons from lethal radiation. Lyons is a character who (if you don’t go out of your way to do otherwise) you will have interacted with precisely once in the completion of the main quest.

The ridiculous part is of course that you don’t care about Lyons, and even if you did, radiation is only lethal to =SOME= of the characters in the Fallout Universe.

When I was finished the game I was being followed around by Fawkes, the super-mutant, a character whose species has been previously established as being entirely immune to radiation. Despite having this character nearby, for whom radiation is nothing more then a pleasant tickle, the choice remains between you and Paladin Lyons.

… which is ridiculous.

The choice is the same if you have the robot or ghoul companion, both of which are also immune to radiation.

In addition, as a character you are probably carrying multiple means of reducing or mitigating radiation that you have gathered from around the wasteland, and this particular brand of “lethal” radiation has been shown to be not-so-very-lethal-at-all because the Colonel, an unmodified human wearing a leather jacket, survives it (though the game doesn’t address this unusual turn of events at all).

They set up an insane situation, and then compounded the insanity by not taking into account the companions they had built into the game.

The opportunities, they has squandered them…

I really liked this game until I started figuring out what was going on, and then it filled me with an ever-growing pool of incandescent rage.

<>

I don’t agree. The attempts at real world examples and lessons are not laughable. Their honest and truthful to life. There is an old saying…”The pathway to hell is built upon good intentions”

The TenPenny quest ends harshly, but its truthful to life. I like it because it does not try to sugarcoat it, and say they all lived happily ever after. That is simply not how it works in this life. Its pure Chaos Theory. Every single action has a consequence, and out of that consequence comes another action, than another consequence. The TenPenny quest may leave a bad taste in your mouth no matter what, but thats how life truly is. And I would prefer unbridled realism than feel good bull. And the same goes for every other quest in the game.

u all talk to much its a game dont think to deep

[quote]Also, I think killing Roy and his friends, altrough it is an evil act, I admit, it´s far a more reliable solution than letting an homicidal maniac in the tower, or than killing a whole tower full of people.[/quote]

Okay. So we got ourselves a description of Roy. But what is Tenpenny then? St. Martin himself? He shoots people from his balcony with a sniper rifle and calls that a “Wasteland Safari”, he pays killers to liquidate YOU and engages Mr. Burke to wipe out an entire city, which I would say is bigger than his tower. By ignoring those facts, you demonize the ghoul and sanctify the _other_ (not: the real, but the OTHER) homicidal maniac.

And somehow no one here mentions Gob – the friendly Ghoul of Megaton – if you don’t treat him like an asshole (like everyone else), he becomes your friend.

What do we see? The poor people of Megaton (or let’s say relatively poor people, at least they got a walled-up city to live in) show exactly the same prejudices as the rich snobs do. Surprise-surprise! Bigotry everywhere. Murder everywhere, wasteland everywhere.

The only right choice is to get on a big boat and sail to a country, furthest away from that radiating ground-zero-America…

It seems that nobody is raising the issue of private property rights. The tower is owned by Tenpenny and leased to a number of tenants. They are not obligated to admit anybody and everybody. Even if you don’t like their reasoning, or the criteria they apply, they have the right to draw a line and say “no entry!” to whoever they do not want entering their property.

Roy Phillips is nothing more than an immature thug who cannot get over the fact that somebody doesn’t want to let him play ball on their court, so instead of going off to play a different game or find his own place to frolic, decides that it would be best to commit mass murder. If somebody is capable of perpetrating a massacre because they were excluded from living in an exclusive community, they are already far from an ideal resident!

Anyway, in the end it goes back to private property! Tenpenny can do with his tower as he pleases! Private property rights trump the rights of people to avoid being offended or excluded. If I don’t want you playing in my sand-box, you can go elsewhere and find your own sand-box, but you cannot play in mine.

I agree with the general evaluation of the particular quests mentioned, and also the remarks that there were too many “questless” dungeons; the questless vaults in particular were a colossal let down, each one filled with empty rooms and barely even a single plot item, just more regular powerups that I maxed out on long before, not even a single unique goodie (except perhaps the trivial bobbleheads), barely even a single moving or revealing survivor diary, of which I feel every vault should contain several (compared to the rest of the game, the visual effects and general execution of Vault 102 were also really amateurish) The writing howlers, such as the Lamplight Caverns, which are evidently constantly replenished with prepubescent children over the course of two centuries by some unknown force, given that everyone who gets old enough to reproduce is immediately booted out, not to mention the whole nonexistent economy thing, also stuck in my craw a bit (I wondered, for a while, if the idea was that the population was decimated to such a degree that all the canned and dry foods in the various shops around the capital actually could have lasted long enough to sustain everyone for two centuries, but I just don’t think that’s remotely plausible – I’m sure they just never bothered to actually think out a plausible post-apocalyptic economy, another wasted opportunity). I was willing to ignore the latter, barely, but the former was just crazy.

However, I think it’s an extreme reaction to denounce the entire game because a handful of its many, many quests sucked (yes, even the second half of the main quest; I feel the whole rest of the game experience compensates even for that, on balance), and that, being built on a finite budget by a finite staff in a finite timeframe, failed to fully include every last one of the infinite number of complex things we’d have liked to see in it (vehicles would have been nice, though, and surely not impossible – STALKER was supposed to have them and actually did for a while in beta, and that was one of the biggest letdowns of that particular game for me – one should also remember that, while not every quest in Fallout 3 was great, just about every quest in STALKER sucked huge amounts of the ass.). The second half of the main quest and the ending were, indeed, the second biggest letdown of the whole game for me. The biggest, I feel, (and I’m probably in a minority of one, here) is that I didn’t get to do anything at all with the damn Virgo rocket. I mean, I went to the science museum, (and even though I barely roleplay my characters at all, beyond maintaining character consistency, the vault exhibit actually had me imagining myself getting flashbacks to the escape in chapter one – that was a nice bit of design work, although I wish they could have done just a little more with it), I find a perfectly preserved nuclear moon rocket, the museum displays actually tell me how to start its engines, and so I naturally think to myself “HELL, YES!” and spend the next twenty minutes trying to satisfy my chaos-loving impish side by hurling laser beams and pulse grenades at it, hoping to get the damn thing to ignite and blast its way out through the roof in a spectacle of wanton destruction, only for the crushing realisation to sink in that it’s just a static damn setpiece. That, I feel, was a wasted opportunity to rival even that of the main ending.

The thing that confuses me is that Bethsoft CAN write good stories, in The Pitt DLC;
(SPOILERS!)
You are called to the Pitt by a man named Werhner (sp?) who states that the city is controlled by a corrupt ruler name Ashur who slaves people in the Pitt and makes them SAD and ANGRY. You go in, eventually meet the ruler himself, and he reveals he was planning to (with the aid of his steel mills) make The Pitt into a rich, non-raider town and set his slaves free, and that he was only doing it because his baby daughter is immune to radiation and they are trying to find a “cure” from her. You can kill Wernher for Ashur, who promises to release the slaves, or kill Ashur for Wernher, who takes the baby, but it is implied he is less gentle to her. However, he does free the slaves instantly (or at least, the “near future” which in Fallout 3 never comes). I’m not very good at describing, but in game it is a tough choice. There’s no evil dictator or noble rebel trying to free his hometown, just two people with different ways of making people’s life better at the cost of the others ways.