T w e n t y S i d e d
Back when we discussed Fallout 3 as a possible candidate for Spoiler Warning, we talked about the fact that the open-world setting and focus on inventory might make it difficult to keep the story flowing. We knew going in that we’d have episodes like this one, where very little happens and where we spend a lot of time walking and looking at menus.
Still, we did manage to get a sliver of plot in there. I do hope you find something to enjoy floating around in the thin broth of this episode.
About a third of the way through we hit the point where I thought of my column for last Friday.
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.
Revisiting a Dead Engine
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Denuvo and the "Death" of Piracy
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
The random encounter by the memorial: Shamus, you are wrong… this is another random event with a group of ghouls trying to get to Underworld.
There’s always a random encounter at the Anchorage Memorial. One time, I got a dude who wanted water to drink, but I didn’t have any, so he asked me to shoot him in the head before I left. I obliged, but didn’t do enough damage to kill him, so he started attacking me, then ran away. Ah…okay then.
That´s what I call being undecisive.
Indecisive
Do not try to educate me!
Nice, we’ll finally see something not-brown for a change.
Do turn off that radio broadcast next time, that is quite annoying.
These two things aside, a surprisingly good vid today, Randy was adequately evil & loony, a nice selection of bugs shown, and the voice recording seemed to go exceptionally well.
Don’t forget to take (Important name)’s Shocksword after you’re done with the Anchorage, it’ll help a lot on your meleeing character.
randy?
Or Josh. I keep forgetting which one left and which one is playing now.
What is the point of that bridge in rivet city anyway,if they are going to allow you to cross it before they ask you what you want to do inside?”Ok,you twenty guys armed to the teeth wait a bit till I allow you to use the only way inside our city so I can ask you if you are planing on killing us all”.
And that dialogue about why you left the vault,like it was your choice to leave it.And how is it the safest place if it got invaded easily?
Bring on the dlcs,I havent seen those,so itll be fun for me at least.
Oh,and it seems that the one thing this game has in common with fallout 1 and 2 is that you can exploit it a lot.
Several people ask you why you were so stupid as to leave the vault. And you can never just say it was because they were trying to kill you.
“Luke, why did you leave the family far behind?”
1. Ben needed my help
2. I want to become a Jedi
3. I was bored
Why can’t I tell people about this plot point? It’s the reason for the whole adventure! Stop asking me about it if you don’t want it to be part of the game!
Arg!
Is this possibly because the writers thought up the reason for you leaving after they plotted the rest of the game out? You know,
“Hey, Dave, why is the player leaving the nice shiney vault anyway? Wouldn’t he just, you know, hang out there? Maybe play some baseball in the atrium? Wait for dad to come back?”
“I dunno, Steve. Let’s just have someone try and kill him.”
“Oh yeah, that’ll work.”
I choose to believe this applies to the (original) ending as well.
“Hey, Dave. About this ending…”
“What NOW, Steve?”
“Well, it’s just that… we can’t think of any way to end this thing on a good note. You know, the player actives Purity, the Wasteland water is cleansed… doesn’t really feel like a good resolution to me. How can we make this better?”
“Let’s just have Project Purity try and kill him.”
“Dave, you’re a genius!”
“Yeah, I know.”
Maybe the writers wanted you to feel ashamed of your departure, and saw this as a way to nag you? I’m not saying it makes sense, btw…
Let´s not forget the “the place was full of radroaches”.
I think the reason you can´t tell anyone that the Overseer went mad (or mention the people that died thanks to the radroach invasion) is because the writers didn´t want the player to be able to bash one of their Author Darling.
Not only can’t you tell anyone why you left, you can’t tell anyone what an awful man your father is, either. Everyone in the wastes seems to believe James is this great man, out to save the world. But when you think about the things he’s done throughout your life – lied to you about fundamental truths of the world, locked you in a vault with a man he knew was controlling and unbearable, picked fights with that same man over the years, left you to clean up his mess when he left, ran off on a fool’s errand to fix a problem that shouldn’t even exist, messed up the research at Rivet City for his fool’s errand, and then blew up his control rather than open the door and let his seasoned wasteland-survival child deal with the Enclave soldiers holding him hostage.
His death isn’t even a noble sacrifice; it’s a needless ploy that could easy have been resolved some other way.
FO3’s main quest is so stupid.
Amen, preach it, brother!
You know, its obviously giving writers too much credit and is a case of epileptic trees, but I like to think that James is actually an interesting character. The man was an okay scientist (apparently biologist and a doctor are pretty interchangable), he had great charisma but the game never really implies that he was a good father. Maybe Dr. Li says it a couple times but she says a lot of things. I like to think that there was a part of Dad, a very large part, that wanted to complete his dream project no matter what. All 18 years he was raising you, that part of him was fighting with his obligation to be a father, preserve the legacy of his wife. All those years he wanted to get back to Purity, he secretly hated you and blamed you for the project’s collapse. And then, the moment you turned eighteen he was finally able to convince himself, his conscience, that it was okay to leave you, that you have grown up, that he isnt dumping you to go back to his pipe dream but saving (all 50) people of the capital wasteland. Maybe his subconscience actually made him pick fights with the overseer knowing that someday he might get sick of insubordinate doctor and drive him out of the Vault, giving him excuse to forget about this “safe environment for child” crap and make a beeline to Jefferson memorial.
Deep huh?
Maybe, if it wasn’t for all the people telling you James was a “good man” over and over and over again. And people telling you you should be more like James. And the karma god telling you you need to be more like James, which means you do the knee-jerk “good”, “save everyone” option without thinking about the consequences (the Tennypenny Ghouls quest is an example of this, as is James’ entire life.)
James is, basically, an idiot, and if he’s the best mind the Wasteland has (another thing you’re told time and time again), the Wasteland is already doomed.
I’m moving back to NCR.
Well thats his charisma. I mean seriously, the man is so charismatic he can convince the science team to abandon their research and go do his, convince the vault overseer that kills people for not keeping in line with vault-tec directives to violate those same directives, come back to research team he abandoned and make them drop everything they were doing and come back to his project as if nothing happened and manage to leave a good impression on everyone he meets while doing all that (come to think of it, what the hell he was doing at GNR?). Also people say he is a good MAN, not a good FATHER and popular opinion is not always completely true. Dad’s charisma combined with his egoism and inability to think anything through makes him that much more destructive. He reminds me of Jonas Venture from Venture Bros. in that he also had charisma and was loved and praised by everyone but was actually a raging douchebag.
James is considered to be a good man because he actually wants to accomplish something that will help people while everybody else…dont actually do anything. Yeah, thats Fallout 3, everything falls apart if you examine it for more than five seconds. It is fairly obvious that Dad is a hamfisted “father figure” that writers keep poking you in the face with, expecting you to swallow him because he is the “father figure” instead of actually trying to justify anything.
My example is something you might want to pretend is true to make the story feel a bit less stupid, like imagining that the war was actually 20 years ago insted of 200.
He doesn´t convince them with charisma. In fact he doesn´t convince them at all, period. The “convincing” was, more accurately, forcing by the writers. If you watch closely how the conversation between Doc Li and him, you´ll see that “daddy” is being a child asking insistently for a chocolate:
James: I told you! I told you it would work Madison! (Even if nothing has worked yet)
Li: James! What are you doing here?
James: I found a way to make the Project Futility work! And I need the team or something.
Li: What? No, I don´t care!
James: Please!
Li: No! It´s been too long…
James: Pretty please!
Li: I can´t drop our hydroponics work to go clean water! It´s nonsense!
James: Pretty please with sugar on top?
Li: ARG! Ok, I´ll call the team with my telephatic skills and order them Jedi style to follow you. Are you satisfied?
James: Yes! It will be great to work with you again!
Doctor Li´s arguments are actually quite good (for Bethesda) but she drops them herself, James doesn´t do anything more than push with “Please please please please! It is im-por-tant for the was-te-land!” and so on. She´s just as stupid as James.
Also, the “Good Man” thing didn´t bother me, because I saw it mostly as a synonim for “I´m sorry your dad died.” I recall Three God is the only one that says so before he dies, and we alredy know he is Karma Entity. So yes, according to the in-universe moral god, he was, in fact a Good Man and a Good Father. How could the player want SO badly to go after him otherwise? How could he say things like: “Please tell me where he is! I miss him so much!” if not because he was a Good Father? And then, what Krellen said. The Karma Entity tells you, indirectly, to be like him and do stupid things: let the homicidal ghoul inside a departamental tower because they are being object of racism; let the bloodsucking cannibal quasi-raiders live because “they are different”; euthanize everyone in Matrixvault instead of trying to hack or blow the Overseer´s pod to pieces (because this is a game about sacrifiiiiice!)…
So no. There´s no way in hell we can ustify James´ actions. He was just That Stupid.
Addendum: I too was confused (to say the least) about James going to GNR after completing the plot. But I found the answer quickly: it was an arrengement with the Karma Entity, to show his Verb, Three Dog, his Holy Radio and his Holy Assistance (which serves nothing, as pointed in the last episode).
On another note, I don´t know how the hell he traveled all the distance he travelled wearing only the vaultsuit and a .32 revolver, the worst weapon in the game. Oh wait…plot armor…nevermind. I would too go in my underpants and the worst weapon if I had that.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that “convincing” took him all of 5 seconds. Liam Neeson’s voice and all that. Oh, and it is impied that Li has feeling towards Dad (and high midichlorians apparentely)
Well im not trying to justify his actions, just adding a bit of alternative character interpretation. I was trying to politely say that James IS a reckless idiot, but to outside people he might seem like a great man, a hero trying to make a difference in this world. They dont know what bullshit he made his team and you go through (and thanks to the writers we cant expose it). And Karma Dog has been wrong at least once, with the whole Tenpenny fiasco. Come to think of it, you arent really given any indication as to what kind of a father he was other than what you do. So if you help beggars and solve problems peacefully and choose “I miss my daddy” options in dialogue regarding him, he raised you as a good kid (except the whole Tenpenny fiasco obviously)and if you go the evil route, rape and pillage and say “Im looking for him cause I want some answers” then his parenting methods left something to be desired.
Good Lord, yet another wall of text. Cant we just all agree the writing is stupid?
Also, isnt Chinese Pistol the worst weapon?
Oh, we all agree the writing is bad, it was sort of implicit. We just disagreed in how bad it is. For me, it´s so bad that not even alternate explications can save our brains from getting hurt. The only solution is complete ignorance, a.k.a. “shut your brain off before it bleeds!”.
Your alternate interpretation was interesting and (thousands of times) more rational than what the game shows us, but I don´t think there´s enough data (or lack of it) to support any alternative.
About the pistol, it isn´t as bad as the .32. It deals less damage, but it shoots quicker. The NPCs use it equally bad, however, and the player never has a reason to use those awful, God forgotten weapons.
This entire comment was both brilliant and fun.
“I can´t drop our hydroponics work to go clean water! It´s nonsense!”
Bwa!
Yeah, to be fair alternate theories also fall apart if you think about them too much. For example James sending you to clean out an entire supermutant base real quick supports my interpretation but him inexplicably going kamikaze on colonel Autumn suckers it and any possible explanation into an absurd black hole of pointless. Youve got to be able to stick your fingers in your ears during that sort of thing. I wonder if you can actually make a global mod that changes story and dialogue to something less atrocious.
Help me Obsidian, youre my only hope.
Well,you can always pretend that you were actually frozen for 500 years,and have woken up in idiocracy.Then all of this would make sense.
The bridge is there to discourage raiders from coming. After all, raiders are stupid and don´t change clothes. When was the last time you saw a raider disguised in this game?
You asked about whether the Fat Man is ever not enough. The answer? Yes. Behemoths have enough life that one hit will not kill them, unless it’s a crit. Also, since most of the dmg is AoE, you have to hit close enough to be sure you get someone with it. (Not too difficult, but you _can_ miss, as Josh shows.)
A note: If you leave the radio signal on while playing, it can obscure what you’re saying at times.
One thing I hate about Dr. Li dialogue is how you always say something incoherent in regards to leaving the vault. No matter what option you choose it makes you look like a juvenile idiot and daddie’s boy. You cant just say the truth, “Id be happy to stay in the Vault for all eternity but in an attempt to keep me safe dear old pops managed to almost get me killed. He isnt big on thinking things through, as you doubtlessly know. But hey, who would have thought that after twenty years of pissing off the opressive Orwellian selfrighteous prick running the establishment, with enough men at his side to take on Evergreen mills and sealing the deal with a direct act of defiance, leaving your teenage son/daughter behind wouldnt be the best course of action”. I guess it didnt fit into the dialogue box.
Also the HTS mod isn’t as hard as you make it out to be. Every humanoid you come across has food and there are enough aquapureit pills to make Project Purity (more) redundant. Maybe you actually have to hunt for that stuff for your first few levels but after that it may as well not be there. An alternative is Xodarap’s fallout overhaul primary needs mod. The whole batch is modular so you can pick only this one or some more and there are some interesting ones there, like ammo rarity, oldschool tag skills, radiation overhaul and more. Its more balanced and you get your status if you open and close wait menu. It is buggy though. My personal favorite is Fallout Wanderers Edition needs mod (also modular). It warns you about your status through questlike updates
and lets you fine tune every aspect of it (hunger thirst and sleep multipliers, well rested perk, sleep healing based on END, STR or vanilla). Oh, and the spelling is right.
The version I have doesn’t have people dropping extra food. I know that’s either an option or part of another mod, because I remember reading about it, but it’s not part of the one I was using. (I had to uninstall it when I got Anchorage.)
But it’s true. Food comes in a little faster than you use it, and so by level 10 the mod is more busywork than challenge. You could solve this with gradual spoiling food, but that wouldn’t make sense in-universe, since the food is already 200 years old.
Well water purification pills dont make sense in-universe. Or trees for that matter.
The real problem with these sorts of mods is all the stuff manually placed in the world. All the containers can be changed to increase the rarity of items spawning within. However, the stuff that was already placed on shelves, foodomatics and tables has to be painstakingly removed by hand.
Considering how much food and meds you find just plain lying about, increasing rarity can become a lot harder. Seriously, according to fallout wiki there are like 200 stimpacks outside of containers and the number of foodstuffs is probably even higher. This is especially true with magazines, they are never randomly found inside containers but the ones that are already there can give you like 50 points in every skill. I have a mod that makes them give you special perks instead of skillpoints as a workaround.
That’s why some mods(Like FWE,) remove the health bonus from food and water.
The guy that Josh pickpocketed, isn’t that the Android? One of the few where it makes sense that he is immortal. Though I guess the ‘blood of kings’ doesn’t apply so much for him :)
When I found out that he was in fact an android I tried killing him and had loads of fun emptying weapon after weapon at him, only for him to go down, and then get back up again over and over.
One of the interesting things is that Harkness and Shrapnel (?) are both invincible (quest characters) so you can endlessly fight them both in the market if you’d like. Shrapnel usually gets bored and whips out a missile launcher though. Although that does bring up a little more nonsense: I’m not quite sure how I get blown into separate pieces while Harkness just stands back up. Is he the Terminator or something?
Fairly sure it is Flak. You need to mezz him for the Paradise Falls quest.
Occasionally, he carries Fat Men around as well. That came as a painful surprise.
Nah,he is captain harkness from doctor who and torchwood.
What. The. Hell. I can’t stand the whole “Replicated Man” quest. What is this supposed to be an homage to? I could see either “Doctor Who” or “Blade Runner,” but why!?
There’s this HUGE problem with introducing the whole idea of “The Commonwealth” and “The Institute” and that is that it majorly screws canon. So, wait a sec… you mean all the technology ISN’T 50’s looking, only MOST of it? This quest broke the whole universe, both canonal and aesthetic for me. Why why why? Was there a writer somewhere you just couldn’t do without this being in the game? Was it so important as a SIDEquest, that we have to break the whole feel of the universe? *Bleh*
All other writing issues aside, why mess with perfectly good Fallout cannon? Isn’t that why Bethesda spent money to BUY the Fallout IP in the first place? If you were a developer, why would you spend perfectly good development money to buy and write for already established universe that you like, only to turn around and bollocks it up!?
Because they actually thought that they were staying true to Fallout. Lawl.
They are fairly close to “cannon”. Question is, which cannon? FO2 is constantly screwing with FO1 cannon, for example.
Anyway, not everything is 50ies-looking. Or have you missed the 1980ies punk rockers called “Raiders”, which is a homage to the Mad Max movies? Or the 1960+ look of the small guns? Or the 1980ies look of the laser weapons?
Actually…the energy weapons from F1 and F2 do look like they leaped out of 1950’s comic books. The whole “nobs and buttons” feel with “raygun” aesthetics. Even the original power armor looks closer to something that the “Moon-Men from Venus” would wear as opposed to an actual tactical protection system.
But, yes, so the raiders and alot of the small guns aren’t so 50s looking. Some of the small guns look downright modern. But at least F1 and F2 were consistent with each other. There’s a general “feel” that you can count on visually.
For raiders: it’s the apocalypse. Mad Max established all the tropes. They were easy to build on aesthetically. We already know who they are right when we see them. The look just works for us as an audience.
For the small guns: Guns from the actual 50s look too close to WWII. And while Fallout tech is supposed to be clunky and bulky and heavy-looking, it’s not supposed to remind us of grandpa. This is still sci-fi. So, I can understand those choices as well.
For Fallout 3, I still can’t understand The Institute angle. Where did this uber-awesome tech come from? If Vault-Tec, probably the most well-funded producer of the age can’t come up with computers sleeker looking than the PipBoy, then how the hell did we jump all the way over to androids? More importantly: Why? What do wasteland settlers, very much worried about clean food and water, need with cybernetic human replicants?
And that’s a whole ‘nother barrel of monkeys because then there’s “The Railroad,” who are all apparently too busy helping out this one android and scattering holotapes all over the wasteland to notice the tens of hundreds of other HUMAN BEINGS who are being constantly enslaved all around them. There’s even a slaver disguised right there in Rivet City! Remember Sister? Who’s watching that guy? Well, not The Railroad, I guess.
Its aggravating how Bethesda always seems to go for the most absurd option. Why android? Why?! Why couldnt he just be some important genius slave or something? Were they that eager to pay homage to whatever it is that quest pays homage to?
The PLASMA weapons is 1950ies. The LASER weapons look like ugly 1980ies mass produced cars, only in rifle form.
Anyway, I think the whole idea is that the Institute actually have kept inventing and researching, just like the Enclave. As for the railroad… it is stated in-game that there several other railroads and underground organisations for human slaves (no pun intended, since The Pitt literary takes the slaves on a railroad to the Pitt ;) ). You even meet some of them when you do the Lincoln’s Memorial quest.
It is clear to me. Bethesda tried to insert into the fallout universe their own super-duper technologic faction. Fallout 1 had the Brotherhood, Fallout 2 had the Enclave, Fallout 3 inserts the Institute (sort of). They probably wanted to see if people liked the idea, so instead of inserting them like a major faction, they mention them and show how awesome they are.
“They have androids! What Do You Mean It´s Not Awesome?”
If only they did the same with freaking druids and vampires…
“Canon”. Cannons are guns.
The raiders in Fallout 1 were not punk-rocker looking. You can’t really justify FO3’s mistakes with other of FO3’s mistakes.
I can and I will ;)
Not until you admit Bethesda’s game isn’t Fallout you can’t. ;)
re Captives (this is a bit too long for a video comment):
You can rescue them and not take their 1-3 pieces of food (it’s random) for the most Good karma. Taking their food gives you a little less karma, but still net +.
Setting them free, not taking the food and killing them for the food nets you zero, I think. You also get a suit worth 3 caps and a corpse. Inarguably the best option.
Yes, killing them has no negative effects, and if you’ve got the Cannibal perk (like my latest Demon Spawn playthrough inspired by this Spoiler Warning), it also nets you a nice bit of healing.
I’ve started carrying around a pistol just to execute the captives with a bullet to the brain from behind.
Cannibal’s healing takes a loong time, and yields 25 hp or so. I took it on one (short) playthrough for a bit of roleplaying, but rarely used it :(
Yeah, it’s not really all that helpful in the middle of battle or with only a single “meal.”
It does make the Blood Ties quest a little easier, which can make bloodpacks much more useful.
Nice. That scavenger on the bridge usually happens to disappear in my games, the skillbooks are very tempting.
You could go to the Museum of History next after the simulation, see Moira again and get all the Lincoln-swag. It would be educational too!
And Next Episode is where it really gets interesting, having never seen any of the DLC’s =D
Oh, and why did Harkness decide to try punching you to death? You stole all his Ammo.
Trust me, the Anchorage dlc is nothing special. You just get dumped in Alaska and shoot guys. And then shoot guys. And then shoot guys some more. There is literally nothing else there, I dont know how they are going to make it entertaining.
I agree. The problem with the other dlcs is though, that they’re generally geared towards characters in higher levels than Reginald here. There’s all the buffed up enemies and extra damage you’ll be taking. The Pitt might be doable though, and it’s definetly more interesting than Anchorage.
bullocks. I _HATE_ the pit.
and I will hate any future addons, games, mods or fanfics that tries to take my stuff.
MY STUFF. MINE!
Yeah, I was in my high teens the first time through Point Lookout and was very close to getting wrecked several times. Rednecks can take a huge amount of punishment.
They actually have something like a +-19 scripted damage buff on them. +19 when attacking, -19 when hit. It gets atrocious at higher difficulties when it scales into the high twenties.
It´s actually 30 points of unreduced damage whenever they hit. Yes, even if the shot hits you in a toe. The effect is applied to the weapons, and when you loot, the game changes them for the normal version.
I haven´t seen the damage reduction you mention, but I know they have more hitpoints than your avereage raider: the less hitpoint-y one has 150, which is twice as much as the thoughest raider.
Bethesda doesn´t know the difference between challenge and annoyance.
The shotguns hurt so bad! Argh.
I went there on level ~5 because I needed the Ritual Knife (lv12 and 10 stabbings in one Vats round? Hell yes). Couldn’t even scratch the rednecks because they just dealt and soaked too much damage.
Which in itself is weird. Is his ammo not in his gun? Isn’t it loaded with at least a few rounds? If so then why can you steal the ammo and not the gun?
It’s all in the wrist.
I actually like it with less plot. It makes the game, and by proxy, the show, feel less “serious” and more fun.
BTW I hate Dr.Li she is probably the games low-point. It’s not just the railroading of the games main-quest but her constant mood swings. At the point where you’re escorting her and a few others through the secret tunnels filled with enemies (wait what?) she switches between a helpless damsel in distress thankful for your assistance and an angry psycho at the drop of a hat.
Fallout 3 is a great game most of the time, but of course it has to talk.
No kidding. Her staple response to any attempt to talk (which you need to do in order for her and her friends to stay put and not walk into a firefight) is a terse “WHAT IS IT?!!”
I wanted to say this last episode, but forgot to. I know You all go on and on about how we have “no reason to find Dad,” but really, I think as an 18 year old just out of their lifetime home with no connections and a runaway Dad, that’d be the first thing we try to find. It actually makes sense to me.
As a player though, we have no motivation to find him. We’ve seen him a couple of times, then he disappeared, apparently causing an attack on our lives in the process. There’s no real compelling motivation there for us to find him. We basically know everything about nothing, and not too much about that. Why bother with Dad when there’s no (clear) reason to find him or emotional investiture in it?
Exactly the point I made few episodes ago.Compare this with half life 2,which is a linear shooter,where you have a whole game and one expansion of getting to know an npc before they require you to save their life.Really,you spend hours with alyx before she becomes mortally wounded and you need to do a side quest to save her.And yet,despite this being a linear shooter,I felt less railroaded by that than with this main quest in supposedly open sandbox rpg.
Yahtzee likes to mention this point a lot in his reviews as well:You cant just tell the player “this person is important to your character”,you have to show that.
I totally agree. In writing for games as in for shows, if you want to be effective, you cannot rely too much on the player/viewer to fill in the gaps. You must engage them; just picking a plot line because it sounds reasonable is not enough, you must sell your plot.
Which could be done easily, in that context. If you imagine growing up in a Vault, the perspective of finding yourself outside should be terrifying, on your own or not. Actually, that’s about the *only* situation in which I can imagine an 18-year old looking after their dad rather than reveling in their newly found freedom…
I would be okay with it if you could have the other response too: the “nice job breaking it, dad, you know your unannounced escape made the overseer kill Jonas and trying to kill me. What the hell were you thinking???”
Again, if finding the damn guy just required a bus trip to Safeville it would be the most logical thing to do. But as it stands, chasing your inconsiderate parent is very likely to result in rape, torture, mutilation and death (not necesarily in that order) by radiation poisoning, friendly fauna, dehydration or stray bullets.
To me the issue isn’t that there’s no motivation, I can see how there might be, the problem is that there’s no choice. You can never say “screw my dad, got any side-quests?” the game constantly assumes that you desperately want to find him.
Also Icewind Dale 2 is awesome. I carried that cat through the entire game just because. ^^
Well, the game does assume that if you keep following in his footsteps. Otherwise, you can just vote with your feet and stop tracking him.
True I guess but you sort of stumble across people who constantly assumes you are looking for him and you can’t say anything to change their assumption.
There is a logical stop though. When you have found him the first time, you can tell him that “fine, you’re safe, I am not coming with you I have stuff to do”. I usually play the main quest fairly early up to that point and then, when my character knows he is safe in Rivet City, he or she goes exploring their little heart out.
Ah, Rivet City. Home to the bug that almost made me wanted to stop playing this game.
I got to Rivet City some 3+ hours after my last solid, non-quick save. I fooled around in there for another hour (doing sidequests, murdering people for their useless pre-war money by reverse pickpocketing nuka-grenades, the usual). When it was time for me to go, I tried to go outside and the game crashed hard. And it kept crashing no matter what I tried. I could go to any sub compartment inside the boat, just not outside.
Apparently if you stick around to long inside Rivet City, the game will ‘forget’ the outside world exists and won’t understand what the heck you want to do as you try to go outside. Fun times. Not sure how the hell Bethesda manged to do that; it’s almost the sort of thing you would get if you purposefully set out to create bugs.
I got a bug where you would be unable to save or fasttravel anywhere when you left Rivet City. The solution was to walk outside the city into the save-free zone and kill yourself. Yeeeeah.
Re: Fawkes (and every other companion)
This is for the people writing any kind of cinematic game like this where you have followers: Either give the followers a metric ton of interesting, funny, or appropriate things to say so you don’t hear the same phrases 50 times every 15 minutes, or give us an option that lets us threaten them with death if they open their mouths.
No idea what follower you used, but there was always something hilarious about hearing Sergeant RL-3 going around the wastes calling every Deathclaw we met a Communist.
I had Fawkes and the female knight from the Brotherhood.
Fawkes would repeat stuff like:
“Our steps must be measured.”
“It’s amazing people trust you enough not to attack me…”
“In all things, a calm heart must prevail.”
“There are times… I feel… the primal part of me…pulling me away.”
Combat was pretty much standard super mutant dialogue.
The knight kept telling me about my father all the time. Ugh.
That’s why I always choose RL-3.
He’s a robot, so it’s very easy to ignore his lines always being the same; and you’re right, nothing beats his declarations of “I’m going to kill you as a personal favor to Uncle Sam”.
The people at the start were running because just behind you there are (at least on every playthrough I did) a bunch of wild dogs, whilst they can’t really figure out the path up to the platform, but the people still run away.
The guy didn’t lose health because you were shooting his minigun
Complaining about fast travel is a bit rich too – would you prefer games to go the way of Far Cry 2 and make you travel everywhere by shitty jeep?
So here’s a question for everyone: Given how much a lot of people dislike F3’s dialog trees and what have you, is there an RPG made in the last 5 years or so that made you feel like you had some kind of freedom of choice or a large selection of outcomes that were totally different from each other?
This isn’t an attempt to find a reason to dump on your favorite game, I honestly want to know if there has been something out there attempting to be a grand-scope RPG that manages to deliver what a lot of people think F3 lacks.
Edit: Crap. This wasn’t meant to be a reply to Josh. Apparently hitting “reply” and then refreshing the page doesn’t cancel out the reply function. Ah, well…
Morrowind was the last true sandbox rpg Ive played.Though it didnt please me because of the autolevel of monsters,and it got a bit boring.Fallout 1 and 2 were the biggest sandbox rpgs Ive ever played and finished.
Though,now that I think about it,both avernum and geneforge were quite big.But I think fallouts were larger.
Eschalon is a great rpg for exploration and multiple paths,though still not as big as fallout 1 and 2.But,even so,it does deliver what fallout 3 lacks.
Though there are still loads of great rpgs that are big and branching(like arkanum,baldurs gate,planescape:torment),none were as open as the original fallouts.
Right, but that’s why I said “within the last 5 years.” If one relies primarily on text for moving the plot, you could almost have a real-world simulation game by this point.
I wondered if anyone knew of a recent one that attempted the same cinematic stuff as F3 yet succeeded (if not more so) where F3 apparently fell short in the role-play/decision department.
Uhmmmm… Vampire: The Masquerade?
While overall it was worlds better than fallout 3, it did have its own railroading issues [spoilers below]:
-At no point is there an option to not tell Lacroix you saw nines at the murder scene, even if you’ve already joined his gang and don’t want to rat him out.
-There is no ‘I won’t open it’ option, despite the character being told not to. There is only ‘open it’, ‘let someone else open it’ and ‘let someone else make that decision’.
And some other minor things. Great game, loads of choices, but those two just kept me baffled for 5 minutes before I randomly picked a dialogue choice that let the plot roll on.
Huhwha, you can have someone else open it which is kinda the definition of “Don’t open it.”
Also the first one in PnP vampires, at least elder vampires can tell when you lie if you are younger than them, IIRC. So it’s probably best not to insult the leader of a VERY powerful faction at his seat of power. And he already knew you would be lying anyway because well, HE SET US UP THE PLOT, to recycle an old joke. He was conspiring with Ming Zhou and would have likely said an agent of his saw Nines leaving the house shortly before the fledgling left it. Just to kick start his little blood hunt.
What I loved about VtM:B is the sense that when you finish it, it would have happened mostly the same, just with some other shmuck in the divers seat, had you not been there.
Don’t open it and let someone else open it are hardly the same thing. The game does not let you decide to not open it at all, despite giving you warnings towards that. You either pick who opens it, or leave the call to someone else. None of that are choosing to not open it. Where is the ending where YOU get to choose to lock away/destoy the thing?
As for the lying: Noone ever told the main character that Lacroix can see through your lies, nor is it at all mentioned in the game as far as I can tell. At the very least they should have let the player try and fail if need be.
Furthermore, Lacroix needs the players statement on this to be naturaly and naive, not forced through domination. Knowing you’re lying is one thing, but forcing you to tell the truth could very easily destroy the credibility he hoped to gain by having you make the statement.
Ehlijen he could just claim he had someone else watching the house, to “Monitor your progress,” Then when you called him out on spying on you, he’d ask why you were lying and use it as an excuse to kill you for being a pawn to “his enemies.”
You’re not getting the politics and plot behind that scene, LaCroix KNEW Nines/Ming was going to be there, he didn’t DEPEND on your word to tell him that. He could say another agent spotted Nines there, or he could blame killing Braun on you. You had already told him that the hunter was there, and if I recall correctly that the hunter didn’t kill him.
And Straus(True Camarilla path) won’t open it, he’ll actually go out of his way to avoid opening it and to remove the possibility of anyone opening it.
And Straus lets you know before you do it that “Don’t Open It” is his intention all along.
I do get the politics. Lacroix flat out tells you that he needed someone of your character’s naivitee to make that statement in order to have it fly with the rest of the primogen. If he needs to coax said statement out of you, that’d ruin the whole point of having you make that statement.
But my main point is that the game itself does not present you with a reason as to why you can’t rat nines out. You can even talk to jack beforehand and he’ll just say ‘you gotta do what you gotta do’ with no justification. The game should have let you try. Maybe not succeed, but at least try.
As for Strauss not opening it: Sure he’ll tell you if you side with him (or at least noone else up to that point). But why, if you work alone or for the anarchs can’t you say ‘I now I’ll break the key rather than either doing what I shouldn’t or giving the key to my worst enemy, not knowing what’s in there’?
You forgot to mention the rather underwhelming contents of the box. Oh yeah, and the multiple alignments and endings promised by the box? Doesn’t really change much of anything.
Also, Humanity was too easy to regain. But never mind, I still love that game.
Eh,
Camarilla/Prince ending you die along with LaCroix presumably leaving either the Sabbat, Kuei Jin or the anarchs to take the city. Kuei Jin ending you lead the way for them to win the city, but get tossed into the ocean inside the sarcophagus by Ming Xiao. You would then fall into permanent torpor in about a fortnight. Camarrilla/Strauss ending he shows up and takes the sarcophagus to a safe place never to be opened, you live and reign as his sheriff/Apprentice. The neutral ending, you leave LaCroix to blow himself up and ignore all factions. Presumably setting yourself up as a power-player with your own territory in the city, once leadership get sorted out. Or if you open it you get blown up like an idiot.Most of the consequences of your actions are assumed from what you’ve done in the game so far. But you can extrapolate onwards fairly well.
There was actually another ending planned, IIRC, where you sided with Andrei and the Sabbat.
Well, it came out five years and six months ago, but it’s a modern, first-person, cinematic, 3d-graphic game, so I’m counting it. VtM: Bloodlines has multiple solutions to many quests, meaningful choices that actually affect the game, and multiple endings based on those decisions. It’s also completely voice acted (IIRC; there might be a few tiny non-voice acted parts, but nothing I remember clearly). Had Fallout 3 been more like Bloodlines, I probably would be a much happier person.
So considering that Troika was doing this five years ago, with the same basic technology, why does everyone else fail so badly?
Because Troika failed when it tried it?
Yes, the game was buggy, largely due to EA’s production cycle and the game being developed on a brand-new never-before-tested engine. But EA (if not Troika) has realised profits on the game through word-of-mouth sales years after release because the writing, premise, and story is just that good.
Activision, not EA, but the points still stand. On top of that you had the game go on sale the same friggin’ day as Half Life 2. Honestly, there are simply a multitude of reasons why this game failed in terms of sales, but to my understanding was and has been a critical success.
Honestly, VTM is a brilliant example even if it flawed. Also realizing I first played it six years ago is making me feel old.
i think it wasnt even brand-new, it was the pre-release source engine.
@blanko2: It was pre-release source engine where the code they had, IIRC, didn’t have things like, rendering optimizations, AI code and was buggy as 2 day old bear scat. Also remember they were forbidden to announce it went gold before half-life 2. They were forced to rush it out the door probably 6 months too early.
@Roll:
sad innit? could’ve been a much better game…
troika didn’t have much luck with publishers, from what i recall
Let’s not forget that the wide range of powers available can make for very different ways of tackling the quests (gotta love these uses of Dominate and Dementation in dialogue! I’m just your pet turtle anyway).
It could have used losing the werewolf, a little more friction between factions, and a better main story line, but I must say it was a stellar game, that kept me enthralled through way more playthroughs than any other.
Also it could have used a less combat-centric ending. If you tailored your character around diplomacy, then you are screwed at the endgame.
I see this as a common problem in great games, and the reason is almost always the same: publishing cycles. Games that get rushed out unfinished get heavy-combat endings, because combat is easy and everything else takes time to work out right.
They also fired their writers about half way through.
re: skipping dialogue.
This happened to me in Fallout 3 and a lot of other games when I have subtitles on. I’ll read the subtitles in a snap and just skip to the next line so I can get more subtitles to read and thus skip the voice overs in the process.
I don’t know, I think I’d feel weird — now that I’ve gotten so used to it — if there was no spoken dialogue in games but at the same time I wouldn’t mind if all they recorded was various forms of gobbledygook; say like what the Sims speak, or that weird language from Jade Empire or that equally weird one from Shadow of the Colossus. Something that ‘sounds’ right and then just having the subtitles there…
Honestly, it’s a shame they can’t do all the fun stuff they used to do due to voice acting being an issue these days.
That is why I keep subtitles turned off in games like Mass Effect where I want to keep my eyes on the well-animated characters and not just reading the subtitles. Its the same problem Shamus has: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=272
Man I’m sure focus-testing says THE KIDS will scoff at anything without full voice acting nowadays but personally I wouldn’t mind if it went away yesterday, at least for games with a significant amount of dialog. I’m entirely too mortal to politely sit there and wait for a pile of polygons to finish sloooowlyyy speaking a line I could’ve read 26 times in the same amount of time.
That hunger/thirst mod should’ve included a penalty for drinking all that water. Water Intoxication is a real thing, and let me tell you, it is UNPLEASANT.
Or maybe just add in a need to void your bowels that increases gradually over time proportianately to the amount of things you consume.
Oh, and maybe give you the option to consume your own urine, even though that’s of debatable usefullness in real life.
REALISM.
Nonsense! Water intoxication is great fun! I did it once or twice with friends of mine. Makes you pretty high but the after-effects in the toilet are somewhat…unpleasant.
Remember, don’t do drugs kids
I once went on a long mountain biking trek, after reaching camp for the day, having taken my own ‘shorcut’ also known as a twenty mile detour, I was… a bit parched. By a bit parched I mean I ended up drinking the whole world. The whole god damn world, turned it into water and then drank it.
First there was pain, then there was hilarity and then there was rivers of piss out my eyes and ears.
Let me tell you about fun, PROJECTILE VOMIT IS NOT FUN.
I’ll gladly take your word for it.
I don’t suppose you could give us a link to the survival mod(s) you and Rutskarn are using?
I think they were trying to, but there was a bit to much going on while Rutskarn was detailing the exact name.
Search Survival on the Nexus, or maybe Primary Needs.
(I too, however, would like a Link.)
I believe thats the one Shamus is using.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3661
You might as well try this one, I dunno.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1008
I reccomend the one from this batch
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2761
That first one is the one I’m using, and I believe the one I linked Shamus to. Highly recommended, if a bit on the badly-spelled side. I can’t imagine playing without it.
I second the Fallout Wanderer’s Edition (third link), although for me the default food and water needs aren’t high enough. I still find it too easy as there’s food everywhere in this game. Luckily the mod allows you to adjust these factors making it as easy or as hard as you want
it isnt compatible with fook2 though, is it?
):
i like FOOK2
There’s(EDIT: or rather there was) a compat patch for it. It adds too much gear for me though, game becomes more of a diablo, weapon is better than the last, lets exchange it every five minutes for a side-grade.
Also it adds so much gear that from what I’ve seen it mostly preserves the FOOK weapon power, rather than the FWE weapon power. If only because it’s easier for the modder.
You can use Fallout Interoperability Program mods to tie together FWE, FOOK2, MMM and I believe something else. They work fine for me and I even have some XFO on top of all that. You can also choose between FWE weapon balance and FOOK2 weapon balance.
And yeah, the default hunger and thirst in FWE are pretty slow, I always crank them up to eleven (or eight and six anyway).
FOIP is’t for FWE AND FOOK it’s for FWE and Weapon modkits/MMM/Project beauty/EVE or Fook and the same. The most recent versions of each are completely incompatible. The mod I was thinking of FOOK and FWE merger which hasn’t been updated since FWE version 4.11.
Maybe, but I got a bunch of compatibility patches and all three are working fine. Although I dont follow all the updates so I may be a few versions behind. I remember there were instructions on compatibility tuning in mod descriptions and on forums sowhere.
fook is on version 2 1.1 beta2
so yeah, no WMK does work with it too well an FWE im pretty sure doesnt either. cuz of the vast amount of changes that have been made to the two latter ones. WMK hasnt changed much, i think
whats funny is that i have a ridiculous amount of mods for oblivion and i get absolutely no crashes, whereas for FO3 i just basically have FOOK2 and a few other tiny ones and i still get a hole billion of crashes all the time.
some are mod related, granted, lots are game related and i think they’d be less if my computer was a bit higher in the requirements tree. still its an interesting thing to think about.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Doesn’t crash?!? Are you sure you’re playing Oblivion?
weOCPS eliminates 60-80% of crashes Pope.
Yeah same here, I ran ridiculous, nay, REDONKULOUS numbers of mods in both Morrowind and Oblivion and it’d either work or refuse to load entirely/obviously be broken. But with Fallout 3 there’s a lot of playing for 30 minutes, crash to desktop, disable some mods, play for 30 minutes, crash, re-enable those mods because they apparently weren’t the bad ones, disable some other ones, repeat.
@telefon, Or you come across places like Canterbury Commons for me, where the entire 70x100sqft backside has disappeared and become a massive window to the void.
…so what changed, exactly?
:P
@blanko2 weel, lets just say I fell into a hole in the terrain that was about the size of HALF of canterbury commons. It turned out fallout streetlights wasteland was conflicting with something and causing a terrain mesh to tear or otherwise disappear.
Modding Fallout 3 is almost a suicide. The GECK has a tendency to CTD for no apparent reason. “Want to see a model of a weapon? Want to add some lights? Make new perks? New assets? Sorry, I´m gonna crash!”à§
Then there´s the actual game crashing. On my older computer, the game was playable for around 2-3 hours with or without mods. My current one, which is just a year old and exceeds the recomendations, crashed every 30-45 minutes with mods, and every hour without. This makes me think that Fallout 3 wasn´t programmed to work with Radeon cards and/or quad-cores and/or Intel cpus.
I don’t use any survival mods, but I use a lot of others. One I like (I can’t link to it as I am at work)is Can Opener that makes Power Armor much rarer. It ups the stats on them, but also makes them unlootable, so the few you find are that much more precious. The name comes from a perk it adds that let you scavenge other power armor clad characters fo spares, to repair. Before you get this perk you can’t repair the power armor you get.
You know I’ve been re-watching the vids and I gotta say I’m pissed.
JOSH HOW THE HELL DO YOU KEEP FINDING SUCH NICE STUFF? Even when I’m not playing with any mods installed I don’t find so much god damn nice stuff.
It all depends on who you kill and luck of the RNG, if you’re a fairly safe player, doing sidequests early, staying away from the DC ruins etcetra, you likely wont get much of anything very early on. But if you do something like I did today, where I came across Outcasts raiding a raider stronghold. Note I have FWE on hardcore mode installed at level 2 on a freshly created character. But anyway I follow along with them looting bodies and the ruins themselves I came across a desert eagle, 3 hunting rifles, 2 10mm pistols, 3 .32 pistols, 3 stimpaks, 2 amphetamine, 3 jet and 5 scrap metal. Which may not seem like a big haul when you watch this series but with FWE it’s massive!
Also I reinstalled to lust up some hatorade.
When I was in rivet city I used the “carry stuff outside of sight and loot it” technique on every item in the market. Then I sold most of it back to the traders if I remember correctly (kept the drugs).
I was kindof surprised that you didn’t do something like that, but it took a long time to do it, so I guess it wouldn’t have fit the timeframe well enough.
In oblivion, where that exploit doesn’t work, I found something simple that worked equally well: Take the starsign that allows you to turn invisible, go to a shop, turn invisible, steal one item you want or lockpick/pickpocket or something, wait 24h for the ability to recharge, repeat.
Guys you can get Primary Needs stats to show up in the hud using the Darnified UI. It’s on the Nexus.
The Darnified UI is a godsend…I refuse to play either Oblivion or Fallout 3 without it. http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1085562-wipzbeta-darnified-ui-f3/
Righto. I never knew about this, so getting it. That’s… just so much better than the default stuff.
Ok I haven’t used the mod so I won’t comment on how useful it is. I did see the screenshots though and… OMG the font is going to kill me! It’s so tacky get it away please (cries in a corner). Seriously the new font in dialogue is atrocious!
Tried the mod yesterday, and felt exactly the same. My eyes! It also went a little too far in shrinking stuff and I didn’t have the patience to try and customize it. Then I realized the vanilla interface didn’t annoy me nearly as much as Oblivion’s… Maybe I’ll give the mod a second chance at some point, and see how much I can tweak it.
please leave point lookout till youre high enough in levels.
PLLEEEEEEEEASE.
also, in the category of mods: FOOK2, my favouritest mod evar.
I really hope you guys use that chain of car explosions as one of the ending clips, though the ones you already have a pretty hilarious so I could see you not doing so as well.
I think it was fine you guys were talking about a mod so much considering that it’s just the kind of game that almost anyone playing it for not their-very-first-time-when-it-just-came-out is probably using some sort of mods anyway. Considering how much this game revolves around inventory management and wandering through areas where the most interesting thing is a molerat attacking you every few steps you’ll eventually run out of things to say about those things anyway.
Also….those were some nice missing large non-moving targets a building’s distance away with a nuke skills.
When listening to the waiting part I remember this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU7JFrnFiGQ&playnext_from=TL&videos=hiGYXcVB_XE&feature=sub
Quite hilarious, albeit set in oblivion. :P
You can gather those mutilated stuff and sell it to the doc in underworld
Interesting, never knew. How much is he paying?
I seem to recall him saying he is out of human bodies to study or something, so you may be on to something.
No, I dont think so. I recall specifically carrying this crap to Doc Graves and I didnt even get a special dialogue option. Wich is really stupid.
hmm.. barrows always asked for organs or somesuch when I talk to him. I’ll have a look later tonight.
Wow, really enjoying this SW (and the better video quality). Made me pick up FO3 again for a few kicks and kills. I have been sating my action RPG needs with Stalker COP lately, but this is a much more intricate environment to wander.
One small gripe is if Josh could avoid spinning the camera around too much. But it’s a small gripe; I probably do the same when I’m playing.
Looking forward to seeing Alaska again next episode…
The best sandbox game I’ve played is a little mod called ‘Tortured hearts’ on Neverwinter nights. There was zero, ZERO railroading in that mod.. you had to work your ass off to even find the main quest..
BWAHAHA!
I just watched all the way through. Shamus, you guys realize Josh killed the Scavenger/Merchant with that last round of nukecars? Scavenger and his dogs are what is is on fire on top of the bridge at the very end.
[EDIT]
Just watched the first few minutes of the next episode. Yup, you guys realize it.
;)
And apparently it wasn’t the dogs I was seeing om fire. Forgot that car was up there…
[/EDIT]
In the very short list of things on which using the experimental mirv fat man is not overkill, apart from fawkes, I personnaly add Crow’s pack brahmin. I swear that thing is EQUIPPED with every single piece of armor it’s carrying. I emptied about 6 to 8 full clips of the xuanlong assault rifle, at least two full clips of Sydney’s smg, four frag grenades, a few laser rifle shots and even some victory rifle headshots in that brahmin AND IT WAS STILL STANDING!!! Even with my small guns skill almost to the max AND the difficulty on very easy. if it had gone aggresive while I shot it like that it likely would have killed me. At least it never gets hostile no matter what you do to it because having to fill something with several hundred bullets while it mauls you would just be no fun.
I was going to comment on this a few episodes ago but i would like to say that when you get caught pick pocketing several times they attack you because there is no enforced martial law in the wasteland. Please notice that there isn’t a jail in Megaton but there is a sheriff, he is simply there to gun down anyone who breaks the law. This is commented a few months after you made this season and i believe you have figured this out by now.