T w e n t y S i d e d
How do you feel about meandering? Is this something you like to do? Are you down for a good meander now and again? If so, then this episode has been lovingly crafted with your particular needs in mind. Both our character and our conversation are rudderless. Adrift. Directionless.
This episode does provide a nice showcase for Bethesda’s questing system, which the design team nicknamed, “Screw You For Trying To Play Your Character, Fanboy.”
We’re done recording this season of Spoiler Warning. All done. If my math is right then the final episode of Fallout 3 will appear on August 10. It’s just as well. These bodyguards are costing me a fortune, and the Bethesda assassins are bolder and more desperate with each passing week.
Also, we lost track of time so this episode is crazy long. Whoops.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
Rock climbing Joel, rock climbing.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Shamus – the video is listed as private, wrong privileges set.
Point lookout was the best DLC. It gave you new areas, items, and change of scenery and while the main quest of the area was fairly linear the other quests were interesting.
It also had the utterly, utterly broken Ghoul Ecology and Superior Defender perks that turned low-damage high-rate of fire weapons or mult-shot weapons like the Metal Blaster into mook-munching machines of doomy doom doom.
1. Metal Blaster is already a mook-munching machines of doomy doom doom.
2. I kinda think all the DLC is broken in some way. Anchorage can get you power armor at like lvl 2, the pitt gave us the metal blaster, broken steel the Tesla cannon and the lvl cap, and well mother ship zeta gave you a fucking spaceship with a death laser and alien weaponry.
not disagreeing just saying its all broken.
What´s interesting about the DLCs is that, besides giving you the munchkin gear, Bethesda tried to balance it by giving the mooks you munch with your machine of doomy doom doom unavoidable damage and ludricrous hit points. And failed miserably.
So here’s my question: What would be the solution to giving you better weapons/armor via DLC?
The standard gripes seem to run counter to each other. On the one hand, if you get a munchkin-type item, it “breaks” the game (though you’re not forced to use it), but if you were still playing with, say, the Chinese Assault Rifle as your best weapon, most likely you’d think the game was too hard or was now too much of a boring grind-fest.
On the one hand, the ending is now “meaningless” to some. On the other hand, the previous games ended hard, and the players of F3 pretty much demanded a rise in the level cap and a way to continue playing after completing the main mission.
I’m not sure what the solution would be, programming-wise, but if it’s a role-playing game where choice is your goal, you could choose not to use the best stuff you find. And if you do, well, I’d say that shows a healthy survival instinct.
That is an interesting question. For starters id suggest giving the players above average items instead of completely overpowered, but Im not sure there is room for that in the game and there is a very thin line between giving you an edge and giving you an insurmountable advantage.
Balancing the enemies is also pretty difficult. Id probably mix them up some more, add some variety to the enemies instead of just making tougher and tougher dudes with bigger and bigger guns.
Also, one of the reasons people hate the damage bonus so much is because it doesnt really fit into the enemy hierarchy. It just seems strange that a bunch of lobotomized tribals in rags and ugly inbred hillbillies are many times more dangerous than the entire Enclave military force.
I always figured the swamp folk were the “Deliverance” flavor of Ewoks, inbreds able to outclass any armored force. :)
And that does remind me of another gripe people have: On the one hand, enemies are too easy, but on the other, I don’t know many people who think the idea of enemies scaling along with you makes for a good game experience.
I think having a couple types of enemies scale with you could be pretty cool. Mainly organizations like the Enclave.
Yes, because teddy bears defeating the Empire with rocks makes so much sense.
Sarcasm aside, they are a lousy attempt to give the munchkins something that could potentially kill them (not that they´d see stealthed PCs with the chinnesse suit, but anyway…). So the player has a gun that deals 30 damage per shot and shoots three times at once? Let´s put some enemies with 500 hitpoints then! The player at the end of the last DLC had like 540 stimpacks? Let´s add an unreductable damage bonus of 30 to his enemies so he has reason to use them…!
The result? In one hand, we have the not-munchkins, who don´t have/want to use the munchkin gear, who will be terribly underpowered against the new “uber”mobs, or will need “tactics” against them: mines, stealth attacks whose usefulness is limited unless you have a munchkin weapon, maybe luring them to other hostile ubermobs (which can´t be always be done)…and that´s it. The non-munchkins will also end probably with a lot less health items than the munchkins for obvious reasons.
On the other hand, the actual munchkins aren´t stopped, but are just slightly annoyed because suddenly they waste more ammo/stimpacks. NPCs suddenly become bothersome instead of challenging.
What would be the solution to giving you better weapons/armor via DLC?
I think the overpowered enemies aren’t the problem. They’re a valid response to giving the player better items. The two problems I see are: (1) Items added without consideration of the implications and (2) Ease of access for said items. (I think it goes without saying that the enemies could have been buffed in a better way.)
The first is pretty obvious. The metal blaster is powerful, but isn’t _truly_ game breaking until you’re getting critical hits all the time. That stealth armor? It’s what lead to Josh being able to utterly destroy so many enemies so quickly. He could stealth any time. The first solution is to really sit down and think about what you’re adding to the game, why, and, most importantly, what combinations it creates. If you can auto-stealth to get auto-crits with high-damage weapons, maybe you should reconsider that as a game designer. So limit the stealth somehow, or, if you already have the stealth suit in the game, don’t add a weapon that lets you 2-shot some of the strongest enemies in the game.
The second problem can be handled in a number of ways. A common one is the level restriction. Put it on the item itself. Perhaps you should restrict _when_ a player can access the DLC (and use a good plot reason for why!). The new items are not a problem if you’re level 20, beat FO3, and bought the DLC. They are if you’re level 5 with Power Armor, Stealth Armor, and the Metal Blaster. That’s game breaking. Even simply make the enemies difficult enough that they can’t be beaten until a bit later. (EDIT: That is, make the enemies in the DLC tougher and, as a result, the items requiring you to be a certain level/skill to obtain them.)
Perhaps the Stealth Suit should give you temporary bursts of invisibility, perhaps every time you are spotted, and require a cooldown before it could be used again.
Definitely. Invisibility on-demand is just way too much. And/or, it could require a really hard to get fuel source to operate, so you would need to make each use count.
BTW, isn’t it amazing how much stuff is still lying around after 200 years?
Pretty much my first meaningful mod was the Cloak Dagger, which is on the Nexus. It gives you a stealth field, but only when you have it equipped and drawn. It also increases melee and unarmed sneak crit damage slightly, and vanilla knife crits greatly, because vanilla knives sucked. It does the absolute minimum possible damage, so you play like TF2 spies, positioning yourself carefully before you switch weapons and strike before recloaking, and you can’t wipe out a roomfull of dudes without any of them noticing without real skill.
This is what I think DLC should add. Change the game, don’t just let me play the same game with stronger weapons. Sidegrades that give me new tools to approach old problems in new ways and create new problems for old enemies.
When you do the next series can you see about putting a cap on the volume decibel level in the editing stage?
Josh’s constant yelling in my ears forced me to stop watching this series, even though it was entertaining. It just wouldn’t be fun to turn the volume down so low that his shouting was bearable and nothing else was audible.
It was sorta like trying to watch an episode of MST3k, while someone was sitting next to you periodically blowing an air horn. Funny, but annoying and a test of patience and endurance.
Rock climbing.
I never had this problem.But then again,I have awesome speakers set so that I wont have a problem when I watch movies with whispered dialogue followed by an explosion.
Tried my speakers, too. Subwoofer turned Josh into something like the cannons in the 1812 Overture. Wanted to kick the darn thing, even with the channel for it at minimum volume.
It was either him boxing my ears, or scaring my neighbors, neither made for a very fun time watching :/
If you sub is kicking in that much even at lower volumes, then you might just have your bass turned up too loud. You could try playing with your computer’s master sound settings.
I’ve listened to Spoiler Warning with everything from quality speakers, to a crappy $1.00 pair of ear-buds, and never had any problems. Maybe you just have really good hearing?
I peg the subwoofer channel volume at minimum, I suppose it’s Logitech’s fault for using such powerful subwoofers on otherwise small systems. Maybe I’m just more irritable than the average person about loud sounds coming by surprise, though.
The voices are significantly different in volume and audibility, though, and at the least that’s something that’s easy to fix with a mixer or just having the individual people adjust their line-in volume gain.
I guess the length of this episode partially makes up for the missing episode last week.
I love it how when you lit one of the paladins on fire,the other one commented “You honor us with your presence”.
Oh,and if bioware was given this story to fix,theyd go:”Rocks fell,everyone died,and the world got recreated this way…”
And how is the enclave a threat to the brotherhood anyway?Not just that youve blown up their main base,and killed ton of them,but they are even weaker than the brotherhood soldiers.
That part with the mine made me laugh out loud.It was such a superb act of sensible violence(well they did railroad you in the worst way possible in that dialogue,so you have to lash out on someone).
I think you mean that it was sensible violence because those two at least had the good grace to stay dead (and lootable) when killed.
I don’t think it’d be that difficult to make the core plotline of FO3 make more sense. Massively dial up the level of radiation in the water, incorporate a Trog type affliction into the DC Wasteland population because of the radiation, explain that mom had been weakened by said radiation, and have the robots only be able to produce one unit of water per week.
It’s sloppy, but it tightens up on dad’s motive and it makes clean water much more important. No reason for Bioware guys to kill themselves.
Oh and you guys do know of the beautification mod for fallou3 that helps with faces? This game is so much better with the mods anyway.
Adding mods would sort of defeat the purpose of the series. We’re going to play the game Bethesda released, not the much better game than fans made out of it afterward.
But yeah. When I play, I mod the thing all the way.
yah kinda figured that. And as for traps anyone else fall for the exploding, crying baby doll in the stroller their first time around? Its in Meresti station i think?
Oh yeah, I love that one, I cringe every time I see a baby carriage ever sinse I got blown up by one of those.
I shot them on sight for a while after that one. If we put this and Little Lamplight together, we can assume Bethesda really is trying to make us hate children and babies!
You people keep saying how your character is “the only one they send”, then they repeatedly give you some allies which you murder.
I only just now realised that Liberty Prime death animation is identical to that of the Big Bad in FO2.
The “main story” of Broken Steel is obviously written with a “goody two shoes” character in mind, the writers force you to be one by recruiting you into the BoS, apparently thinking that the BoS are too awesome to refuse being one of them. For the neutral and evil there are sidequests at the purifier and Underworld. The “Final Choice” in Broken Steel is probably an attempt to give you some space to define your alignment, except it doesnt make sense. At the end of the game you can destroy either the Enclave or BoS, but to get that opportunity you have to vouluntairily, without reward, work with the brotherhood. An evil or neutral character would have walked away at this point, there is no reward and no way of knowing that you will get to annihilate BoS, so you cant say that your character is only working for them to bring them down later. Basically, in order to get to the final choice you have to be absolutely Lawful Good BoS paladin. Which begs the question: why would you possibly want to destroy BoS and not the Enclave?
You guys keep talking about the sandbox being the strongest part of the game, and you say that DLC should be about that, but the Point Lookout DLC is about the sandbox, it delivers precisely what you wish DLC’s did and adds a chunk of territory to explore and a few new dungeons to crawl into. Now, It also has the fucking ridiculous +30 damage bonus, which is given to most of the enemies and which ignores armor, but that is an entirely different gripe.
A small lesson in capitalism: Microsoft Points are added to do exactly what you described, kinda like Disney Dollars. On one hand it allows Microsoft to manipulate the prices and make you pay a little extra when you want to buy a game for 300 ms points but can only purchase 500. On the other hand they eschew the real value of their merchandise, making it harder for you to weigh your transactions, turning a straightforward exchange into a little psychological game. When you buy something for 20 bucks you can clearly see how much you are paying and consider if you are getting the same value back. In vague microsoft points it becomes harder due to their abstract value in real money and lack of a little $ sign. They dont feel like money you earned by hard work, they are just points waiting to be spent. Its one of those despicable marketing tricks, like setting the price at 19.99 instead of 20.
The scheme Rutskarn described was used to allow the employer to manipulate his workers, by making them depend on their company in almost every possible way. They will have to use the company’s stores and facilites, thus giving it a monopoly over their livelihoods, allowing it to dictate its terms to the employees.
Since when Bioware prefers the Paragon path? Playing evil Renegade is always arguably the best and the most fun and badass solution.
I always thought TF2 updates were supposed to keep the playerbase alive and growing, and to keep selling the game, though I suppose Funk’s idea is more likely to be true. So, I guess all of the Steam boycotters and naysayers were right and its only a matter of time until Valve takes over the world.
You people keep saying how your character is “the only one they send”, then they repeatedly give you some allies which you murder.
Well, it´s not like they could have survived much longer.
Actually if Josh, frustrated by the rails, didnt insist on killing all of his BoS buddies on that listening post mission, it would probably go a lot faster. Say what you will about Bethesda AI, the paladins usually clear out the place before you actually get to kill anybody. And experience doesnt really matter at this point.
The other point with Microsoft Points et al as opposed to real dollars is they can recognise the revenue when you buy the points (till the standards board catches on anyhow) instead of when you actually buy something with it.
Well at one point Valve was selling TF2 for like…a dollar, so I suspect it’s not so much selling the actual game as it is getting people to download Steam, since presumedly Steam is actually a fairly low maintenance revenue stream. Unlike HL2 Ep3 which is trying to attain Duke Nukem Forever levels of fame.
Trying?
It’s not an accounting scam, so far as that goes. Though, you’re right, they are front loading the transactions, the actual influx of money occurs when you buy the points, not when you spend the points.
Now, if they were recording the real money -> points transactions AND the MS point sales as independent influxes of funds, that would be accounting fraud.
What you’re talking about is a kind of investment fraud where a company records a profit when they buy something based on it’s theoretical future sales.
Here Microsoft records a profit when you buy the points, and then they pay out to the developers when the points get spent. The extra unspent points are basically gravy for Microsoft, but it isn’t fraud.
It is fascinating to watch the conversation with paladin Tristan which is basically the designers telling you: “this is the story we made for you. If you don’t like it, tough, you can just go sandbox and leave the game unfinished.”
This made me realize what I liked best about the first two Fallouts: the lone wanderer as a free agent, playing the Man with no Name archetype of Sergio Leone westerns or Yojimbo. You walk into a situation, and do whatever you damn please; side with a faction, play them against each other, whatever. Even in the main storyline, you never feel like you’re ordered around, and you can always picture that you’re doing your own reasons to follow the plot to its conclusion. You never feel shoehorned into picking a side quite as much.
I wonder if this difference is mostly due to the structure of the plot itself, or just to the sanctimonious dialogue. I’m pretty sure better dialogues would already alleviate this problem. (E.g.: the BoS admitting they don’t like you but they need you, although that would force them to figure out why is it exactly that they need to send one lone guy to do stuff that their big, well equipped faction cannot pull off.)
This DLC is not useless to neutral/evil characters. There is an “evil” option at the end, although you have to “pretend” to be a BoS flunky to get there. It’s annoying to evil characters, but not really useless. Of course, you’ve probably already noticed that since you’re done recording.
On the topic of traps, I have little to add except a hearty “I agree”. Their traps are great. I can comment that the Rube Goldberg machine does not kill everything in the store. Only things within a certain distance (~10 ft?) of the explosion. You can watch it without dying fairly easily. And it’s not actually a trap! The machine triggers an explosion which drops a cache of ammo/weapons in one corner. You can find a note somewhere that tells you to look for it, though I can’t remember where off-hand.
Again, you cannot play an evil character and “pretend” to be with the BoS just to get to the part where you nuke them, because you dont know ahead of time that you will get to nuke them.
I never found a note (though I found the place via the Tech Museum loot note, as the unique Chinese rifle is in the same area). But yeah, the machine has a reward. Some random stuff, a mini-nuke and even some skillbook. Some of it could get stuck, and I guess they’re easy to miss if you… die.
The exploding baby carriages in this game are a devious thing. Someone very clearly designed this powerful trap that looks like a baby carriage, placed it sparingly in a few places, then placed the regular carriages all over the streets. Now nobody who found a trapped carriage looks the same way at the regular ones… The rigged toilets, mailboxes and terminals are similar, but don’t stand out the same way as the carriages.
My favourite trap (type) in Oblivion was a throne at the end of a fort. Those traps are rare, and placed in the end of the dungeon so you feel you’ve beaten the challenge. For the sake of celebration you may want to sit on the throne, in my case formerly owned by a goblin chief, I think.
I did take a seat, and a mace swung down and smacked me in the face, killing me instantly because of my still low health and foolish pride. No cheating either, I had no in-game reason to sit on the throne, and the mace was visible when I looked for it later. I only fell for it once, but it was awesome and worth it.
I’ve said it before, but the Bethesda level designers are clever fellows.
The mailboxes are rare, the exploding terminals are obvious once you notice the little spinning reciever thingy and the electrodes attached to the toilets are very easy to spot, not to mention there is no situation in the game when you need to drink out of a toilet. Also the enemies are extremely prone to tripping their own wires. But otherwise the traps are great.
The traps in Oblivion are usually to obvious because many of them are made as special set pieces with unique architecture. The Aylied (or whatever their name was) ruins are especially guilty of this.
Wait, rigged mailboxes, exploding toilets? Nice.
I pretty much always open toilet stalls, but as you said, there’s no reason to actually activate them (Don’t think there’s toilets without sinks nearby). I guess that’s why I missed ’em in all that time.
Same story here. I didnt even know about either of those until I saw them in the GECK “trap collection” area. Another rare trap is a bent vertical pipe with grenades rolling out of it, I think there is only like two or three of those, and they are all in the Pitt.
I think I found all the traps in-game, before the wiki. The first mailbox was at the Bed & Breakfast place south of Arefu. The toilet trap was at some random office, I noticed the wires and got the MF cells. (For the record, they don’t explode, they shock you… Practical joke taken to the extreme? And black toilet humor, I guess.)
Fairfax Ruins, south of Megaton, has one of those grenade pipes. It also has a similar loose grating like the one Shamus pointed out in this episode.
Yeah, the Bed & Breakfast is the only place in the game where ive seen the mailboxes so far. The stupid raiders inside always activate all of their traps and blow up the mailbox before I get a chance to see it. I have only seen the “leg” of that mailbox, after the fight, and wouldnt recognise it if I didnt know that such trap existed.
The traps in Oblivion can be too similar, yes. Part of the reason (probably) is that they are more often constructed at the same time with the fort or Ayleid city, not added later by random wastelanders. So it makes sense in a way that the traps are part of the (unique) architecture objects, but it leads to every spiked ceiling or crumbling bridge looking the same, as you said. The different swing traps are more stealthy (when tripwire-operated), except those thrones, of course.
It’s the same thing here, I think. There are more types of “separate object” -traps (shotguns, grenades, mines, beartraps etc.), but the rigged mailboxes, terminals and toilets all look the same (antenna/wires), require you to come close, and so are spotted easily. The thing about the carriages is you have to look inside them to see if they’re trapped.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I want to take this opportunity to say how much I dig both the choice of music (opening and closing) and the cleverly altered title cards at the beginning of each episode. Fantastic work all around.
On the point of the Valve/Steam thing, despite Valve being regarded as a “good” company, it’s still a bad outcome for Steam to become the single platform for the future.
There are already a lot of steam-only games, and I think this is a worrying trend.
I tend to use GamersGate and Good Old Games, so I have a vested interest in having multiple competing stores. If Steam wins outright then my GamersGate account is potentially at risk (if GG can no longer compete, they may be forced to close). The same would potentially occur with other outlets (D2D, Impulse et al.)
Steam being a monopoly (or having a controlling market share) is an outcome that will almost certainly be bad for consumers in terms of price, choice and so on.
I can appreciate that many people would prefer the systems like Xbox live, PS Network or the Apple App store, but the PC has always been a relatively open system, and I would hate to see that change now.
I feel I may have ranted more than I was intending to, I really only meant to write a paragraph…
Meanwhile, in Fallout 3…
I was considering your point about Bethesda’s trap manufacturing, and if you couple that with their obnoxious invincible characters, is it not just more proof that they are designing games to grief the player? They taunt you, railroad you, prevent you from killing the ones you really want to, and yet we still put dozens or more hours into this game. Now THAT is a trap. :)
Three things about this episode —
1) You killed a paladin in a room, walked out, and had another say, “you honor us with your presence”. Awesome
2) It was nice to hear you say something good about the game — namely, the traps.
3) It was funny to actually “hear” the three of you start to pay attention to the game, when you met the two ghouls. It was a “wait, what?” kind of moment. You ranted, you paused, paid attention, decided it was nothing, and ranted again. Awesome.
I love Spoiler Warning. Great series. I’m right there with you on the Fallout fatigue though. Definitely ready for the next game. Hopefully it ends up being one you LIKE.
Based on my memory of Broken Steel you’ve probably got, what, 6 or 8 episodes left? Thank god you decided not to do Mothership Zeta or Point Lookout.
He said August 10th, which should make it 3 more episodes.
Where can one find the physics article that gets mentioned in this?
Whoops, I didn’t see the “more” option on the search page. Found it: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1200
Yeah, the ultimate purpose of free TF2 updates is pretty much just to get people into Steam and looking at the crazy deals. Valve’s nefarious plot to offer products people want at prices they’re willing to pay continues unchecked.
Well, I’d say that any plot designed to “help” you decide where to spend your money is pretty nefarious.
Wint and Kidd? Really?
My prediction is that you’ll see them again in the next Fallout.
With a cake.
A “bombe suprise” perhaps?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2GHL8VhMjo
Meander, mosey, mull… that’s 90% of what I do in games, especially ones where the devs have created a world to explore. I want to see it, not mess around with lame palette swapped enemies and idiotic NPCs.
This is especially true in RPGs and those tricksy MMO things.
The next game you should do is Knights of the old republic one, It’s one of my favorite games and will probably bring about some more positive feedback from you guys. It’s got an amazing story too!
I think the default state of NPCs is plot armored though.
I think Fable provides really good opportunities to be an omnicidal maniac.
Something classic might be nice. The original Fallout would make good contrast. Replicating one of the J. P. Morris Ultima playthroughs would be interesting too if the streaming software is compatible with such old games.
I am gonna have to go with Prototype. That game’s story is utterly stupid and needs a good lampooning.
There is goldak everywhere! ( i ight be the only one who got your quote at the end…but maybe not)
Nice episode. Something good spoken of the game, something bad, references to personal projects, lack of connection between on-screen and off-screen stuff, some funny accidents, and a decent length. Overall, a great one this was.
So, 3 more episodes, eh? Can’t wait to learn what the next game is (I’m calling Half-Life 2).
Also, what was Rutskarn munching on at the beginning, there were two sentences that were almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English..
Depleted uranium.
Where may I purchase teeth such as yours?
Yeah. I’ve never finished the plot of any Bethesda game, ever. I’ve done the same in most open-world games with that level of freedom, but Morrowind I have 4 characters and only one got past the “we’re freeing you so you work for us, here’s your new assignment”. And the one who did didn’t actually get much far. My 3 Fallout characters never saw the light of Broken Steel even though I bought the damn DLC. In Oblivion I’ve closed only the first Oblivion gate, tops. I the Might and Magic games I only continued on the main quest once I’ve made sure I’d absolutely done EVERYTHING else there is to be done and having my quest log completely blank. And so on and so forth.
Also, I’d comment and say that the Team Fortress 2 updates were a marketing tool for Steam, but apparently you bunch were clever enough to notice. You win 150 internets. Now if only Stardock learned with that and did the same… though Demigod might count to a lesser extent, I don’t remember needing any DLCs for the extra Demigods they put in.
Wow. Stealth is broken. That is all.
I think stealth is always broken; either it doesn’t work at all or cripples your character too much, or it allows you to stab from the ether.
There doesn’t seem a middle ground.
Oh dear God how I hate Havok Physics. One time in Oblivion, I went into the newspaper shop in Imperial city. I went to their front desk, and right as I got there every piece of paper that was on that desk exploded in every direction.
When I started my first playthrough of Fallout 3, I was leaving the Doctor’s Office, and I accidentally bumped into the rolling table with all the surgical tools on it. And the tray they were all resting on shot out like a bullet to the other side of the room, leaving all of the tools there on the table exactly where they were before.
This isn’t so much as hate, but am I the only one annoyed that when you pick up an object off a table, all the others around it bounce up and down?
And if one happens to fall over, all the npcs around scold you for making a mess.
First, maybe. Second, yes, lots. It’s annoying enough that they always greet you with a speech, and then they add a little topping; whenever you as much as nudge a movable object they scream bloody murder. Even the dead do it.
It’s at its’ most annoying when you’re someplace where the stuff is scattered all over the floor in the first place.
I’ve continually been scolded for allowing my feet to intersect with bent tin cans strewn about on the floor.
Apparently they’re very attached to the arrangement of their garbage. Maybe garbage arrangement is like post-apocalyptic floristry.
Fallout Vegas would have to be pretty freaking incredible to even tempt one of you guys after this, it seems.
Well its being made by Obsidian, which while known for insanely buggy games with very crappy endings, is also known for writing fantastic stories and giving the player a massive amount of choice that actually affects the game(at least with Alpha Protocol).
If anyone still doubted the overpoweredness of the stealth suit, this should proove them wrong. I admit though I had fun for an hour or two attacking random raider/enclave camps wearing the suit and a variety of hats, armed only with the unique shovel from Point Lookout.
And that’s why I love the sandbox in this game. If all else fails, you can always find creative and absurd ways to make fun of all the broken elements in this game. It can be therapeutic.
Soooo… seeing how this series is nearing its end, have you decided what your next game is going to be?
I’d still still recommend System Shock 2, since i’ve started playing it myself 2 days ago. It really is as good as people say it is.
If you haven’t decided what game you are going to do next I strongly suggest kotor with it’s amazing story, awesome twist near the end, and colourful characters. And frankly IT’S STAR WARS! what more could you want?
During your “This boulder has so many polygons” tangent, the only thing I could think of was Batman and Robin.
Robin usually said some weird alliterative exclamation, and then something completely obvious.
“Suffering Subroutines, Batman! That’s a lot of polygons!”
I agree with Shamus about Steam. If they can keep you coming back, you’ll buy new games. I bought KOTOR 1 from steam because I lost my original disks and it was the only way I could get it again. No intention of buying another digital download. Ended up getting both torchlight and oblivion because the deals were too good to pass up.