T w e n t y S i d e d
Here is where things get tough. This episode is very negative. I was coming down with an illness. Livestream was driving us nuts. And we were commenting on Operation Anchorage, which sucks. This made for an episode that was a lot more negative than usual. We actually talked about throwing away this episode and the next, and re-doing them. A total Livestream failure last weekend took that option off the table. So, you get this, or bupkis:
Now, Operation Anchorage deserves all the scorn we heap on it and more. I don’t regret that. But I do regret the overly negative tone of the episode. The goal here is to have fun and deconstruct the game, not just bitch and moan.
Josh continues to look for ways to stream the episode to us during our recordings. Livestream is unreliable and spam-y. Ustream doesn’t seem to have a useful client. (No option to broadcast PC audio, only the mic.) Maybe we should try Remote Desktop, because then we could also help him play!
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
I can’t comment on the episode yet because Livestream is downloading at a snail’s pace. For some reason this episode and the last two I haven’t been able to just hit play and watch. I’ve had to to start the video then pause it and walk away for a an hour or so. All the other previous Spoiler Warning episodes were just fine. Even going back to the first Mass Effect episode.
I blame the 10,000 adverts give or take.
That would be my experience as well, except it’s with all the previous episodes.
I can’t test this one until I’m out of class, but I’m looking forward to it, I think.
Agreed. The last three or four episodes have been incredibly reluctant to sufficiently buffer for me. The episodes are still worth the extra wait and effort though.
Yup, add me to this list. Started the episode, paused it, went to the shops to get some food… came back and it was half loaded.
This one’s buffering okay, but it’s like the video stream is having trouble – even if it has the little blue section of the bar, it’s having to stop and load on occasion, and I’m not running anything really in the background.
10,000 adverts? Try 1. 1 single advert, for a low-quality reality show, that I see before EVERY. SINGLE. EPISODE. I don’t even like car shows, why would I watch a “reality” one?
The worst part is you don’t just get the one ad at the beginning. At the end, you get another. It’s the exact same ad as in the beginning, and you can’t pause it. I end up just refreshing the page to shut it up.
Download seemed OK to me though. But I did leave it downloading for a few minutes in the beginning.
At least it’s not Sid. I always got that twit for Mass Effect except a couple times I got condom adds. A reality show about cars is as much an improvement as … Operation Anchorage isn’t.
Try purposeful exaggeration used for making a point. Purposeful. Exaggeration.
I get the same add every time also. Bing. Friggin’ Bing. With their horrible adverts that make me swear to never use their service.
Wow, I never even realised there were ads for people watching. Living in Ireland finally has its advantages. Take that region-based marketing!
Yeah, as a European I’ve been confused by the comments a few times talking about viddler having ads. Turns out that while I’m still denied the enjoyment of say getting hulu at least I don’t get ads on viddler.
Australian here. No hulu, yes ads on Viddler. Isn’t fun.
I’m enjoying seeing another Escapist reviewer LP, and it’s my first time back to the blog in months.
Ditto. We in Canada get the ads; no Hulu. I have found a way to cheat hulu, but the system has ads. *sigh*
Oh, that’s why people keep complaining about ads? I’m european too, and I’ve never gotten a single one, so I wasn’t sure what the problem was :D
It seems to be region related.I had no problem with viddler so far,though I got swarmed with commercials in almost all other online players.Here,I only get 1 or 2 of those small banners in the bottom,and thats it.
It’s not viddler that’s inundating them with the ads, it’s Livestream.
They’re recording the audio through one app, using FRAPS to capture the screen and also streaming through livestream so Shamus and Rutskarn can watch. Ultimately what gets uploaded to Viddler is just the FRAPS + audio recording, excluding the livestream nonsense.
It’s a pretty complex setup. If budget were not an issue there are far more high tech video conferencing solutions that would accomplish this, but alas this is about as good as a person can do for free.
Honestly you might have stumbled onto something with Remote Desktop….have you ever thought about Livemeeting, GotoMeeting or one of those services? The person in control can broadcast both PC audio and video to multiple clients simultaneously. Never tried it with a game though…no idea how that would work.
As for making uStream a viable option, you can get a third party app that will reroute your audio inputs so that your Mic stream is the same as your line out stream. As far as ustream knows, it’s still using the mic, but it will be getting a decent audio feed. I know there’s a program that does this, but I can’t remember the name right now. I’ll see if I can hunt that up.
As for Operation Anchorage, the DLC I thought was only so-so…it wasn’t worth 10 dollars, and it didn’t feel like fallout at all.
The only thing that’s good about it is the loot at the end, which is phenomenal….and you automatically get the power armor training perk at the end so you can start wearing the T51b power armor immediately, which has one of the top damage resistances in the game.
Mothership Zeta is much more interesting as far as DLC goes, but it still doesn’t work well as part of a fallout game. It feels more like a DLC pack for Prey in which all of the interesting gameplay mechanics were stripped out.
Broken Steel is by far the best DLC pack, though The Pitt isn’t bad.
so you can start wearing the T51b power armor immediately, which has one of the top damage resistances in the game.
wrong, it has the second highest: the normal T51b is tied with Hellfire armor. The winterized is alright, but definitely second.
Second highest and “one of the top” would be synonymous to most, I think.
More significantly it has something like 9999800/100 repair, so it is always in top shape. Unless you take nearly 10 million damage over the course of the rest of the game. (Note: this was when I played, it might have been patched out.)
The armor still has a metric ton of health. It’s so broken :P
As for making uStream a viable option, you can get a third party app that will reroute your audio inputs so that your Mic stream is the same as your line out stream.
Erm…why would you need software? Three bucks gets you a Y-splitter. All you have to do is connect a line-out to the mic port. It’s not like this is high-quality surround stereo here. Just plug port A into jack B; it takes two seconds, and a chimp can do it without hunting the internet for just the right software (because that’s been going OH SO WELL so far…), and it doesn’t require Josh’s computer to have yet another piece of software running concurrently while he’s playing.
The problem with what you suggest is that they probably still need the mic input for chat, so you can’t eat up the physical mic jack with a splitter. The software I was trying to locate is free and incredibly lightweight. All it does is trick windows into doubling the line-out channel onto the mic port.
It doesn’t have any real configuration options, just an on/off button and I think a control panel that lets you independently alter audio levels instead of forcing both to be the same.
I still can’t find it though. It’s something that was a small project written by a guy who wrote it for personal use and later released it for free when others wanted it as well. I sent an email to a friend of mine who I think also used it. We used to use it for piping PC audio over voice chat.
I’d like to take this early comment opportunity to thank Shamus, Josh and Rutskarn for making Spoiler Warning. I don’t know exactly why you guys spend so much time and energy entertaining us, but I do know that I had a tough day today, and coming home to a fresh episode of Spoiler Warning is a breath of fresh comedy air on an otherwise demanding day.
Thanks.
I second this.
Yeah, I can sense the negativity. You complain a lot about the Outcasts being “rude” and their armour being unclean (isn’t it just painted?), which honestly… seems a bit petty. All the talk about the door and the absurdity of the concept I can understand, but the Outcasts specifically broke off from the brotherhood because they were being to “Wastelander altruistic” and wanted to focus on the technology instead. What’s so odd about them being “rude”?
Well, the old brotherhood didn’t come off NEARLY as hostile, rude, or hateful. (Or incompetent.) Old BoS had their act together, but kept to themselves. They had a certain military professionalism about them.
The outcasts are not just rude, but stupid and petty. Instead of being Technophiles, they just seem like another group of scavenger douchebags. They’re not building better tech, they’re just scavving like any lowlife wastelanders. It really lowers their stature to see them acting like that.
But this is Bethesda all the way: Have an NPC taunt the player, and then deprive the player of reasonable response. No, you can’t insult them back. (You can a bit, but your insults are lame and you NEVER, EVER, EVER shut anyone up or get the last word.) You can’t point out how senseless their taunting is. If you don’t like it, all you can do is put up with it or shoot them.
Man, if only they had some sort of… skill in the game. Like, something that affected how good you were with speech? Oh wait. They do. But it only gets used for wringing trivial amounts of useless bottlecaps from quest-giving NPC’s.
Arg! I’m doing it again! Someone stop meeeeee!
Now that’s just wrong. You can kill them. And if Bethesda doesn’t want you to, their mortality is one console command away.
Remember, nothing quite says “You’re wrong” as beheading someone with a shotgun.
But yeah, the outcasts are a fine example of an okay idea, bad execution. I always find it funny how they greet me with a “Shouldn't you be banging rocks together, primitive wastelander?” (or something to that effect) when I'm walking around in power armour and weaponry that's more advanced and better maintained then theirs.
“”Shouldn't you be banging rocks together, primitive wastelander?” (or something to that effect) when I'm walking around in power armour and weaponry that's more advanced and better maintained then theirs.”
FIFTY
… I don’t get it. Fifty as in 50cent? Fifty as in their armour is at 50%, while mine is at 100%?
Fifty as in not just plus one, but…
At least, that’s my suspicion.
I love you guys and your scorn. Just saying this to offset the haters.
I second this notion fully.
Keep up the bile.
I’m voting for Bile in 2010!
This message endorsed by the association for disillusioned old curmudgeons who get angry about roleplaying games.
Which is pretty much Twenty Sided in a nutshell.
There is no such thing as too much scorn directed at Fallout 3.
I actually don’t have a problem with the BoS as presented in Fallout 3 because they give a REASON for why they are different than the west coast BoS. They started out just like them. They were sent for tech and scourged across The Pitt on the way into the capitol wasteland. But over time the elder got soft, probably because he had his daughter with him.
That seems very reasonable to me. They are, after all, a military organization. protecting people is a natural offshoot of their mission. I found the Elder Lyons character to be well written and convincing. He knows he’s breaking with tradition. He understands why the outcasts left and doesn’t even fault them for it, in fact he blames himself a little.
I will agree Vegedus that the gripe about the armor is a little odd. My assumption was always that it was painted and was otherwise in pretty much the same condition as the brotherhood armor. It’s a little chipped and cracked, but so is “clean” power armor, and I would wager that paint quality in the world of Fallout is not exactly super high.
The outcasts as presented in Operation Anchorage are pretty retarded, I’ll give you that, but when you consider their back story I think their overall portrayal makes sense. They’re beligerent towards wastelanders because they’ve been forced to protect them for years when they felt like they should be acquiring and improving technology. If you interact with them at Fort Constantine in the wastes you get a little better picture of how they are. A little under-manned and under-equipped, trying to fulfill a mission without the proper resources.
You also raged a bit in the game about how the DLC dumps a bunch of munchkin equipment on you at the end and how they’re giving players more of what they already have…but ultimately wouldn’t that be the case with any loot? any really awesome loot they give you is likely to just be wasted on certain character builds. Jingwei’s shock sword is just another melee superweapon that isn’t any better than a Shishkebob, and the T51b armor is just barely better than the armor you can strip right off the outcast troopers and the same as the T51b armor elsewhere in the game.
This definitely proves your point that the DLC is maybe not worth paying 10 bucks for, but I don’t think the reason of it not benefiting particular character builds enough is compelling.
For the most part I agree- the BoS in the Capital Wasteland isn’t supposed to be the same. The main BoS led by Owyn Lyons have become a more ‘lawful good’ faction because of Lyon’s pity for the populace of the Wasteland, while the same experiences and subsequent schism have led the outcasts (led by Casdin) to become incredibly cynical and embittered, and resentful towards the general populace of the Wasteland. Also, it’s not true that they become ruder no matter how much you help them- Casdin becomes semi-friendly if you give him enough tech, whilst McGraw says “You may not be one of us, but you’re the next best thing” if you save him. I think Olin repairs your stuff too if you save her (and she has the highest non-glitching repair skill in the game)
I actually think their behaviour makes a lot of sense. I mean think about it, the eastern brotherhood has gone soft and seems to care more about helping these “savage” wastelanders rather than actually fulfilling their mission, which is collecting and preserving technology. The Outcasts deeply resent this, so much so that they split from the organisation and the two are now actively at war with each other. The Outcasts would hate the primitive wastelanders for what they’ve done to their original organisation, even if indirectly. These locals are the reason why the original mission has now stagnated and why they’re now at war with their former friends and comrades. I think it would be quite easy in this situation to change from passive disregard to utter distain.
I don’t think it even has to be about deviating from the mission, the fact that a lot of these guys’ comrades and presumably family would have been killed saving the lives of wastelanders and scientists who can’t purify water in a world with hand-held laser weapons(seriously, there’s enough energy in one shot from those to distil at least a couple hundred litres of water). They’ve lost people they care about protecting people who are too dumb to live. I’d be pissed, too.
Ironically I liked Operation Anchorage more than any other mission in Fallout 3 (except maybe Moira) because it felt the least like Fallout, and Fallout 3 is a really shitty “Fallout” game (Moira is the one exception, I think Bethesda hit the feel of Fallout with her NPC and sidequests).
Operation Anchorage rips you right out of the mutated Fallout 3 clone your playing and drops you right into a decent fps. No plot dialoguing to get in the way of the immersion, it lampshades any engine or game mechanics failures nicely with the “in a simulation” cliche… all around I think Operation Anchorage was a good quest line all the while giving some background on the war.
The war which obviously happened 20 years ago…
LALALALALALALALALALALALA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LALALALALALALALA!
I dunno. I liked Andale too — even if it wasn’t a quest — and the Ghould problem with Tenpenny tower was interesting too. Those two and the Wasteland survival guide were good in my opinion.
I disagree with the “decent fps” bit.
That applies ONLY if you came in with a well leveled character maxed out on all the major weapon types.
Well…
I do tend to wander and explore in a circling pattern out from Megaton doing most of the quests I encounter… and I do tend to explore every single sewer, substation, etc… so I tend to be level 15-20 with Small Guns and Sneak near maxed by the time I hit OA… or even get to seeing 3 Dog for the first time…
Also, it could just be the mods I’m using, but I always find a Watts 1K laser pistol on the ground right there at the parachute site. Is that just my mod? Or did Josh and Shamus just miss it?
That’s a mod (the vanilla Laser Pistol is an AEP-7 or something, btw :) ).
Bethesda is the world’s most successful troll.
Seriously. Think about it. They make games that are good enough to keep you playing, but fill them with things which seem to be designed to annoy the player.
Mind you this is coming from someone who enjoyed Morrowind so much that I bought the collector’s edition of both Oblivion and Fallout 3, trying to give them another chance to make a game I’d enjoy as much. I can still hear them laughing at me every time I open the fancy boxes to get the disks out.
I have some fun playing the games, but Bethesda has the last laugh.
Bethesda always has the last laugh.
The existence of Operation Anchorage does seem to support this theory.
The fact that some of us would still play it makes it a cientific truth. (If it didn´t crash so often)
I don’t know, Valve has some fantastic examples of how to troll.
My peeve was that, no matter what fancy technology you’re wearing, how famous you are, or how much effort you’ve put into gaining their favour, they still treat you like you’re some primitive nobody. Bethesda is notorious for making NPC’s who are completely oblivious to player character developments, and the Outcasts are a particularly annoying example of it. At the very least, they should notice when you’re wearing power armour.
Also: someone needs to make a mod so that, when in conversation with an NPC, you can immediately end it at any point by shooting them in the face. Maybe give it a sneak attack bonus, at the “cost” of karma loss from being unsportsmanlike.
Youve crippled that centaurs tounge from behind?!!!
Sooo,basically someone wanted to be funny and installed doom as a way to unlock the door,and now you have to go through it?Smooth…Though,to be fair,most modern shooters are just as long and bad as this dlc,only cost 6 times more.
Also,the dlc was probably made before the game went out,so they didnt read the reviews while making it.Though that doesnt excuse the “content”.
I think that gauss bullets passing through enemies is the fault of combat being skill based,so even if you have 99% chances of hitting,you still can miss.Its just more noticeable with single shot weapons.
Oh,and outcasts have different armour because everyone knows that first thing to do when you split off is to change your colour scheme.How else would people know that you are a splinter faction?
First and foremost; there wasn’t too much bitching and moaning. Seriously, this festive bowel movement of complete mediocrity can’t have too much scorn heaped upon it.
Second point; animation! God Beth really does suck at animations. I know they can’t really polish the animations in something the size of Fallout 3 to say Half-Life levels of goodness; but good lord try and at least make an effort. I can give a good example of this with how you receive the Reilly’s Rangers quest if you go to Underworld.
Use your medical skill or get Barrows to wake Reilly up to ask her stuff, before that Barrows will tell you how she’s in really bad shape and how he THINKS this is Reilly because of it had the name stencilled on what was LEFT of her armour and if you fail to speech check him he refuses to dose her to wake her up for fear of killing her since she’s in such bad shape. So… when you wake her up, does she lay in the bed and talk to you, too broken apart to get up? Or does she just sit up maybe sit on the side of the bed?
Or does she stand up straight like NOTHING IS WRONG WITH HER and stand there like a lamp post like every other god damn NPC does and tell you how torn up she is and how you need to rescue her crew? Yes. Yes this is what she does. FUCK. Seriously. You’re more useless than Bioware at animations Beth; and bioware has some pretty shitty repeating animations for talking NPCs.
Third point; fucking bullshit. Josh goes into VATS, throws grenade and VATS shows in slow motion glory how it rolls behind a crate like a ninja to explode harmlessly — the safety grenade! — and then VATS zooms back to Chinese Guy and Cuthbert STARING at one another, like their helmets touching together staring at one another, for several seconds. Josh whispers, “Fucking bullshit,” harshly.
I cracked up.
Fourth point: Fallout 3 is bloody disorienting. It’s not just there, it’s everywhere that I seem to be able to get turned around and in real life I have a bloody good sense of direction and it usually translates to games. I’mma blame Beth again.
Fifth point: Killdozer. Props to Rutskarn for the reference. Chimera tanks aren’t NEARLY as cool as Killdozer guy though, not nearly.
You can 100% tell that Bethesda does not do motion capture animation. They’re hand-animating everything. All their stuff reeks of it.
I almost wonder if the one-off animations in Anchorage were a foray into mo-cap.
That would be a very expensive foray, unless, as was suggested they outsourced it
Or they’re testing out new, cheaper mo-cap tech. It’s not that expensive to do poor-man’s motion capture anymore.
Maybe they’re implementing it in future games or something.
I didn’t notice whether there were any new animations in Mothership Zeta. The only new enemies were the aliens and the abominations, but neither of them seemed to have terrific animation, not that mocap would really be a silver bullet for that.
That’s true, I suppose it’s unfair to compare it to something that is motion captured. Honestly though, the animations, the animation loops and the animation triggers tend to be bad, bad and buggy and bad.
I figured the Shivering Isles were Bethesda’s first stab at mo-cap.
After playing with the Actors in Madness mod (which lets you use the SI animations), I don’t think they were done by hand. Could be wrong though.
The rock-climbing animation isn’t motion-captured. It is good for Bethesda’s standards, but it’s not up there with most games. Constructing a cliff wall that’s the same size and shape as the game’s just wouldn’t be economical.
However, now that Bethesda has access to id Software, and apparently bought a motion capture studio some time after Fallout 3’s launch, it’s likely we’ll see better animation. Even so, the engine they use is god-awful when it comes to handling animation, so I doubt it’ll ever be up to modern standards unless they totally ditch it.
paused at 38:50 (i don’t have a viddler account), wait a second. Botherhood of Steel Armor? “Chimera” Tanks? bad first person shooters?
These all share a common trait. whoever did this DLC cofused Fallout with Warhammer 40K.
Back in the outpost, you can find out that you weren’t the first Pip Boy -user they got, but the first one presented with the choice of entering the simulation instead of having your arm chopped off… The simulation is indeed a very linear shooter (though the walls aren’t chest-high) and the dialogue and plot are minimal. Doesn’t that mean they removed the things the critics hated most? ;)
Seriously though, Bethesda does seem to have a tendency of going too far with their corrections. People complained of becoming completely overpowered in Morrowind, so auto-leveling in Oblivion. Not finding quest locations was another complaint, leading to the radar-compass.
Wait,wasnt there auto leveling in morrowind as well?I vaguely remember fighting rats at level 10 that were just as annoying as when I was level 1.Though I did play it long ago.
About the pip boy,why all that change?Since when was pip boy something that fused with you and could never be removed?Its never mentioned in the main game(at least I didnt find mention of it),so why here?Does it play a role in other dlcs as well?
Some leveling, I think. The Daedra roaming outside got progressively worse, for one. Mostly it seems static to me. Maybe you’re thinking of blighted rats? They won’t get any less annoying though.
I dunno why you people were knocking the Gauss Rifle so much. That gun is amazing. I sneaked through all of the trenches between GNR and the Washington Monument, 1-shotting every super mutant I found. It’s not that good at direct combat, but it’s amazing for long range sneak attacks. There were times where I took out Masters in one shot by sneak attacking them in the head with this thing.
I play Operation: Anchorage every game just for that gun.
Also, Outcast Armor: I figured that was paint. No matter how dirty something is, it won’t be matte black.
It’s not just black. It’s black with bits of not quite rubbed off red. I’ve been trying to decide if the Outcasts primed their armor black, then painted it red, and then let all the bad red paint job flake away. Or if the red is supposed to represent rust from extremely poor armor maintenance.
The idea that they don’t take care of their armor is reinforced by the Outcast NPC who’ll trade you ammo and stimpacks for technology will almost immediately equip any other power armor you trade to him.
I’m pretty much positive that it’s painted black with red accents to make it look intimidating and distinctive.
All power armor in the game, even the brotherhood’s is in pretty dinged up condition. They get in firefights a lot, so it looks worn because even though the armor is probably still in decent condition the paint will fade and chip. Makeshift wasteland paint probably isn’t very durable.
Also it makes a bit of sense that the outcasts would want to paint their armor. Paint protects metal from air, preventing rust from forming. They don’t have the maintenance resources of the brotherhood, so protecting their equipment is probably even more important.
A lot of it is accents and some of it is rust, but it’s hard to differentiate which is which very clearly though. I think over all the fact that people are even confused whether or not it’s faded paint or rust speaks to something being wrong in the line between concept, design and product.
Honestly the fact is that the armour is black and red to let the player know ‘THESE GUYS ARE BADDIES’ and there’s no logic beyond that. It’s shown time and time again, Beth really doesn’t think beyond ‘This is cool, let’s do this!’ when designing their games. Trying to apply logic in figuring out what the thought behind it was is admirable but ultimately futile; there is no thought put into these things beyond ‘It’s cool!’.
Cars blowing their reactors with mushroom clouds two hundred years after the war? “It’s cool!”
Raiders hanging carcasses of wastelanders they’ve killed from hooks and chains in their hideouts? “It’s cool!”
A big honkin’ nuke throwing robot? “It’s cool!”
Computer terminals scattered across the wastes working two hundred years after the war? “It’s cool!”
And so on and so forth. A lot of those and other things are legitimately cool — and I like cool! The explosions still look really cool — but the thing is… it’d be so much cooler if there was some thought behind it. Give us the cool stuff, but you know, at least try and justify it.
(Those computer terminals and lights really aren’t cool. In a few places I could at least somewhat justify it with “Oh, the raiders/wasters/mutants/brotherhood must have setup generators and found working lights” but a lot of the time… nah ah.)
To be fair, the fallout world of the first two games is chalk full of crap that by all rights should not be working after so long. Part of that is just the setting and stuff we’re supposed to accept.
This is going to seem incredibly pedantic. That’s because it is. But it’s the second time I’ve seen this today.
It’s chock full. Chock. Not chalk.
Thank you for your time.
To be fair, the rest of the world is chock full of people who actually bother to read their Big Books of Science, listen to their parents, and pay the Brotherhood good money and ample respect to keep their shit running, as compared to just sitting around in filthy hovels all day talking about how they saw a mirelurk by the riverside, the filthy creatures.
The rest of the world also has forests, agriculture, brahmin herding, architecture not befitting the set of Junkyard Wars, water which is only irradiated when a nearby reactor is leaking into the ground water, and actually decent writing.
Exactly this. I was trying to find a way to articulate this last night but couldn’t quite manage it.
This. About 70% of wastlenders dont actually do anything ever. What do all these Megaton Settlers do for a living? Where do they get food? Settlements dont produce anything and dont communicate, locals of each town seem to be vaguely aware about existence of other towns or indeed the outside wastes. The only things that seem to connect these settlements are independent caravans occasionaly coming through, otherwise they might as well be thousands of miles away, in different countries.
Its really strange. People back in California have mines, production, farming and trade relations and they even have a freaking republic formation with thousands of citizens, and all they started with was barren desert and a bunch of vaults.
DC wastelanders started out with tons of greatly preserved prewar tech and consumer products, factories and assembly lines, buildings, subway tunnels, working bloody plumbing. And after two hundred years they created jack squat.
Well, they are the descendants of politicians and their cronies, so this is not entirely unexpected… ;-P
(no offense to the REAL DC residents)
Fission batteries. You see them in the world, they’re even used in schematics, and today’s fission batteries can last decades. Sci-fi ones lasting centuries isn’t unforgivable.
I never had a problem with their paintjob.
First of all, they are not “baddies”; you don’t get good karma for killing them and they do not attack you on sight. And the paintjob does not make them look that way to me either.
And their armor is painted black and red, with a lot of the paint being scraped off. Try up the quality on your settings and it should be obvious; if you still need a clearer image download some hi-res texture replacements (you shouldn’t have to, to be able to tell that they are painted black and red).
Except you get no Karma penalty when you kill them, unlike with other neutral NPC’s like Brotherhood of Steel proper ones, AND if you have the Lawbringer perk (where you become a Regulator, you know a guy who hunts down Evil bad bad baddies) they drop fingers. Only killing the ones with names nets you negative karma.
I’m not even going to comment on your bit about upping the quality (fyi, running on max settings) because you seem to have missed the point; bad design — settings really don’t change that.
They are Neutral, unlike those who betrayed their cause and turned Good.
Except for the fact that they drop fingers. Like slavers, raiders and other evil characters.
Look, we can argue about this but to me they just are presented as being ‘the bad brotherhood’ where as — as Shamus has mentioned — the Brotherhood of Steel on the west coast IS actually neutral, not interested in local problems, just interested in preserving and maintaining tech.
With the black and red armour, their hostility and so forth they just are ham-handedly shown as being baddies.
re Kremlin:
“Outcast members are scripted as evil characters (despite being more gray in outlook than black). Thus, fingers can be taken off their corpses if the player character takes the Lawbringer perk. Interestingly, Protector Casdin, Defender Rockfowl and Defender Morgan drop ears instead. ” -Vault Wiki
They’re not all evil, I guess :P
I’ve personally always found them ~neutral, but, who cares. They don’t shoot you be default, which is all that really matters; makes sneak-critting them a lot easier >:)
Re: Vipermagi
Personally I’m a fan of the grenade-in-pants method of dispatching non-hostile soon-to-be-enemies. Though it does make the sneak criticals darn easy too.
Of course they are e-vil! How could they be good? They are not helping the EXTREMELY GOOD Fight of Karma Dog! And what Karma Dog say, stays.
Why don’t you use Skype – run Fallout in a window, set Skype to broadcast that window, hey presto, bob’s a paternal relative.
Yeah I was going to suggest this too. To make it less laggy on Josh’s system (I think Shamus mentioned it bogs down occasionally), you could always have Shamus or Rutskarn do the fraps from their side, too. Of course that could lead to some massive audio desynchronisation but it’s worth testing.
Three points:
To me, this as the first DLC almost feels like spite in reaction to the early negative reviews where people complained that Fallout 3 was completely unlike the earlier games and Bethesda was trying to turn it into a shooter. They said, “Oh, yeah? If that’s what we were doing THIS is what the game would be.” Of course, releasing it completely undermined, rather than reinforcing, their point.
If you torture yourself by listening to every boring dialog tree at your tenth birthday party, you will find out that the Pip-Boy is, in fact, pretty much permanently fused to your arm. And why would you ever not want that?
The Brotherhood Outcasts (although not the ones in the DLC) will treat you somewhat civilly if you find Fort Independence and trade them piles of laser and plasma pistols and rifles for all the assault rifle ammo and stimpacks you could ever use. You just have to make sure you do that before you get far enough along the main quest that you become friendly with Lyon’s Brotherhood. If you don’t make friends with the Outcasts first, they’ll just kill you on sight like the Enclave, the Raiders, and the Talon Company Mercs.
“If you torture yourself by listening to every boring dialog tree at your tenth birthday party, you will find out that the Pip-Boy is, in fact, pretty much permanently fused to your arm. And why would you ever not want that?”
Reasons not connected with wasteland:repair,shower,sex,sleep,(un)dressing,giving it to your child,using it after your death,upgrading to a newer one,and probably more.
Reasons connected with wasteland:losing your arm,getting shot in the arm,getting shrapnel in the device itself,selling it in order to survive,and probably more.
Yes, but if you could take your Pip-Boy off, the Overseer wouldn’t be able to track your every movement. And no Vault Dweller would ever desire that. ;-)
Where is that implied? If Overseer´s could do that (or only the one in Vault 101), then why did he fal miserably in the beggining of the game to found you? If he could track you, why interrogate his own daughter?
Oh, right. Bethesda. Forget I said anything.
“If you torture yourself by listening to every boring dialog tree at your tenth birthday party, you will find out that the Pip-Boy is, in fact, pretty much permanently fused to your arm.”
Yup, it’s what gives you the V.A.T.S. and allows the android hunting doctor to hotwire your nervous system for extra VATS goodness.
It may just be me, but I enjoyed the “bitching and moaning”. However, the sound effects of exchanging assault rifle fire with the commies made it nigh impossible to hear anything else. I never noticed it before, but for some reason in this one it was deafening.
On topic: I really hated this DLC, I wasn’t a fan of the Pit either. It just bored the shit out of me.
It’s not just you, I liked it too. Then again, I haven’t played the game myself so it’s brand new to me. And hey, commenting on a game in an intelligent way like Shamus, Josh and Rutskarn do is always good, whether it’s praising or moaning about an aspect of it.
I didn’t mind the bitching and moaning either. Actually, I wouldn’t watch if it wasn’t for that. It doesn’t bother me even when things get a little bit petty (e.g. the armor color), you have to take things with a grain of salt.
I don’t know, I mean I get a lot of the complaints but sometimes it feels like they’re just looking for things to give out about. Like complaining about being able to hold vastly more items than is realisticly possible (at which point Josh rightfully comments that that’s a very common first preson shooter trope – and pretty much a universal video game trope in my opinion though, but that’s an aside)
In fairness though Shamus does give reasons for the additional bitchyness though in his post
I called it. I effin called it. Youre less than halfway through op: anchorage and you are already running out of things to say. I tried to warn you people, alas you didnt listen and now you shall reap only ruin (or boredom anyway).
Although it is kinda enjoyable to watch, more so than to actually play this at least.
It seems like your standard run-of-the-mill dlc pack done on the cheap. Throwing together a bunch of linear shooting galleries with a game breaking prize at the end requires no effort unlike making some sort of a storyline. The whole thing feels like a typical mod, im surprised they actually bothered with voiceacting and (awful) quest hooks instead of just setting a computer terminal right outside vault 101. It is an awful bland-a-thon, they tried to stir things up a bit here and there but it didnt help much as we are about to see. You just shoot chineese soldiers and its ALWAYS the same environment, snowy mountains with mountainous snow.
Also I have to admit im usually a fan of bitching and bashing, heck I can say its the main reason i watch SW, but some of the stuff you bring up just goes way over the top.
About Gauss rifle criticals, I think they knock people down instead of doing additional damage, wich is aggravating because its a long range gun.
Yeah I had heard bad things about this DLC but I really didn’t expect it to be as linear as this. It’s almost like……Mass Effect :)
Real handy against things you don’t kill in one shot though. Like Albino Radscorpions or Super Mutant Overlords.
And Sneak Attack Criticals still do extra damage, although that may have been one of my perks.
Every crit deals bonus damage, provided the weapon can naturally crit. The Kneecapper, for example, has no natural crits (Sneak Attacks still hit for double, though).
The Gauss Rifle deals 100 damage with 100 Energy Weapons, no %/+ bonus, condition 100%. A critical hit deals an additional 50 damage (which doesn’t change tmk, so a 1% cond GR still deals 50 crit damage, but could be wrong). The Crit bonus is pretty significant :)
Plus, you have to know how to use it…
It is perfect for
A) weak enemies, like a sniper rifle one-shot killer
B) really tough enemies that you want distracted, like Behemoths, Reavers
You can queue up two shots easily, first one on the head, second on one of the legs. The reason for this is that when they topple over, the leg will move and give a very high percentage to Hit. And if you are lucky, this will cause them to tumble some more, keeping them both distracted and limping (when they finally get up).
Facing more than one really tough enemy at once, you can juggle them. You can keep two reavers, two behemoths or two overlords busy by alternating shots between them.
Ha, I just noticed the title of this post! Nice!
I’m not sure if anyone has said this. But I always assumed that this whole DLC was a Stealth Parody of Metal of Honour. I’m only saying Metal of Honour because that’s what I think when I see this but this is about as close to it as you can get without actually being it.
So looking at it this way, while you guys raged and complained. I instead laughed at it because they couldn’t possibly be playing this straight faced. No way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtnXrOzXEe0
And yet it’s still a superior shooter. What? Well it is! It bloody well is. This along with Goldeneye defined shooters on consoles for me, I still love that ping and the visual of the helmet being flung off the enemy when you get a headshot — very satisfying.
Operation Anchorage! Almost on par with a console shooter from eleven years ago! Part of the Fallout 3 experience, a game not quite on par with System Shock 2 an FPS/RPG also from eleven friggin’ years ago.
Goldeneye was definitely good, but I don’t remember Medal of Honour being any more then a pile of shit.
So yeah…
Operation: Anchorage feels like so much wasted potential to me. If they had spent some time making it interesting, and maybe given you a predefined simulation character rather than forcing you to use your potentially-useless character, it could have been a fun romp that gives some backstory to the invasion. Hell, I wouldn’t even mind it being focused on combat if they had made that combat interesting.
Of course, it’s not really like Fallout lends itself to lots of action very well. This DLC would have been way more interesting if it had been about an attempt to infiltrate a Chinese terrorist cell before the invasion, or maybe doing recon or intelligence work to uncover details of the attack. That way you could take the violent approach, while all the regular non-combat stuff would also be useful.
Instead, we got Fallout 3’s awful shooting mechanics, a bunch of repetitive corridors, objectives along the lines of “go from point A to B” and “kill everything”, and terrible writing and voice acting (even more so than the main game). It feels like the whole thing was done in a month by about five people, none of who had any real involvement with Fallout 3 on a design level.
Of course, there’s also the technical side of things: the sloppy scripting, the buggy AI, the fact that a bunch of the new items don’t work properly, quest triggers that screw up, graphical glitches, etc. I also get massive slowdown while playing parts of this DLC because the engine wasn’t designed to have even 15 or so people in combat at once. When rendering large numbers of characters is a weakness of your technology, you should not really be making something that’s centred around a huge battle.
If everyone in Operation Anchorage talked like Liberty Prime, it would totally be worth ten bucks. As it is, it’s just completely generic.
Well, you can recruit a Mister Gutsy for your squad in the second part of the DLC. “Another glorious day in this man’s army!”
I’m Rutskarn, and I approve the pun in this title.
I’m still recovering from that pun session brought on by that one particular Clod of Cthulhu. In fact, that alone is reason enough to tell people to go read your LP. Yes, for OUR comments.
On the topic of THIS LP: I didn’t really mind your negativity here Shamus. I pretty much felt the same way while playing it but with more cussing.
I’m Jarenth, and I approve of this Clod of Chtulhu plug.
I am very surprised that you didn’t go in 10-minute details over how the visuals in O:A are so different from the wasteland, the filter, the colour tone, etc..
I played through O:A exactly once. Yeah, for 10 bucks it is probably not worth it, but if you get fallout in the GOTY pack, the cost of DLC comes around 2 bucks per each or so – well worth that price. Frankly, I treated this as a mindless break-time from the tedium of “OMG Irradiated Wasteland Raiders Mutants” that gets seriously depressing in F3.
As for the bitching and moaning, it was quite tolerable – at the end, it did get in a rather negative tone, but overall it was not a problem.
And when Rutskarn pointed out the Chameleon thing of Oblivion – that somehow made me want to replay Oblivion once again.. Yes, the dialogue is bad, animations stink, etc. etc., but the world of O is just.. Well, very nice. Certainly a good contrast to Fallout.
See, you can’t really judge this as a two-dollar add-on. The DLC version was and still is $10, and the only reason it’s cheaper in the GOTY version is so that they can keep the game’s price up while at the same time generating demand. Sure, you can’t complain for what you paid for it, but that’s also quite different than complaining about what Bethesda are charging for it as DLC.
“Operation Rancorage” combined with that title card (which I believe is Old Olney) made me immediately think this would involve Deathclaws somehow. I mean, they do kind of look like thin versions of Rancors from Star Wars.
What confused me most about the outcasts, is they painted their armor black and red. Was that the only paint they could find? If you’re fighting an ideologically based war with the people you splintered from firstly: You consider yourselves the true brotherhood, why paint your armor in the first place? It seems you would want to make them paint their armor, or change it as minimally as possible to portray the idea that you’re the “real” brotherhood. And if you paint it, why go for black and red? They’re traditionally evil colours and intimidating or not, do you really want to portray your group of rebels like that? The only explanation I can imagine is they’re essentially really petty and want to make themselves seem dangerous and frightening.
Oh and the explanation for why the DLC makes no sense is given as the Colonel who you’ll meet later worked on the simulation and as time wend by he became progressively more erratic, insisting the thing be turned into some ridiculous, idealized power fantasy of his, departing widely from reality and it’s original purpose. This is explained somewhere in the bunker as far as I know, or you could look at the Fallout 3 wiki for a better summary. Either way they knew it made no sense, they just put you through it anyway.
I wonder why it opens the storage door.
The software mutated due to radiation.
I’m afraid to ask if that’s the official explanation or not.
Afraid to ask.
I’ll save you the trouble. I headed over to the wiki to check my facts and here’s what they say:
“A terminal located in the Outcast Outpost reveals that he ordered the scientists to constantly re-do the simulation until it “felt right”, aggravating his subordinates to the point where they noted it in their progress reports and doubted his sanity. This could be due to post-traumatic stress or arrogance engendered by his high rank. ”
It’s kind of vague about what exactly he changed, but it’s safe to say it’s not what was intended. So yeah.
I’ve looked around and I’ve got nothing. It makes absolutely no sense in the context of practicality or anything else. And even the people who made it knew that: “At the very end, the writer questions why running the simulation was necessary anymore, since “any tactical data was mined months ago”.” (quoted from the wiki).
I see three possibilities:
1) The outcasts are blindingly incompetent and, upon finding no way to open the door, resorted to trial and error, crossed some wires splicing the unlocking mechanism into the simulation by accident. (likely)
2) They did it intentionally to use the simulation’s uploading of performance data to the mainframe as a way to piggyback their own commands through the system firewalls allowing them to unlock the door remotely. (unlikely)
3) One or all of the groups working on the system, past or present was completely crazy. (certain, but not mutually exclusive)
Maybe the security administrator and his crew were just jerks.
My personal thoughts: The completion of the simulation was originally meant to be a final test for soldiers in training, and the graduation ceremony included him receiving his power armor & assorted equipment from the storage.
There is enough stuff inside to arm a small batallion.
Or one 19-year-old scavenger. It’s all relative.
Still, our hypothetical soldier was supposed to haul around TWO sets of armor designed with vastly different tactical purposes in mind and switch up on demand? Or said soldier was supposed to stroll in and pick whatever he likes? Who is he, James Bond?
And the chineese stuff shouldnt even be there. Good grief, the more you think about this stuff, the more bs comes out.
Well, the Lone Wanderer does that…
Agreed on the Chinese stuff though, they could maybe supply the top of their elite with the stealth suit, but not with a Chinese rifle. Infiltrators probably wouldn’t wear power armor.
The realism of the simulation was indeed demolished by General Chase. He insisted on adding Chimera “tanks” for example. I think Vertibirds were another addition of his. I don’t remember whether I read this in-game, however.
Yeah, the Wiki agrees with you – vertibirds weren’t around at the time of the simulation, and people have no idea if the Chimeras should have been there or not because there’s no collaborating account of them.
Why paint their armour? Because the other guys haven’t. The Brotherhood are descended from military personnel, so I’m happy to accept that they’d act in accordance with military regulations about having distinct uniforms identifiable from a distance, which is good sense, anyway. In addition, Casdin mentions that they took on the Outcast label as a snub to Lyons, and painting your armour black with red accents does make it clear that they aren’t the friendly, charitable arm of the Brotherhood that wastelanders can come up to and bother for help.
Did anyone else start to feel that the “Outcasts” were the dominant Brotherhood faction after installing an increased spawn mod? Regular patrols of anything up to a dozen guys rolling through the Wasteland, killing Deathclaws and helping me against the Enclave just made them seem more in control.
I think around episode 6 or so I finally broke, reinstalled Fallout 3 for another playthrough and even got the DLCs (and some mods) that I didn’t have on my first playthrough (I only played through O:A and The Pitt… yeah, I never really finished the game since I was too lazy to get Broken Steel, I intend to to fix that this time around) and since you were going for O:A I decided to take a detour for that one to have it fresh in memory.
Since it was a while my memory may be failing me (you know, the whole “don’t remember the pain” thing) but I think the first time around A:O is slightly refreshing. Since the location is placed pretty much in the middle of the southern side of the map I think you’re supposed to be able to get it sometime mid-game, where you can already handle the mutes outside but at the same time quite a way before you associate yourself with the Brotherhood. So what do you get? Firstly, instead of “all the shades of brown” you get a general combination of white/blue/grey. Secondly, I think it’s supposed to break the whole “wasteland feel” (more on that later), you’re supposed to finally see the the actual army, people in clean clothes etc. the BoS after that feel somewhat disappointing, you can actually see how much they’ve fallen into disrepair.
I’m not sure what brought this DLC however, to me it feels as if they were creating a level for testing some mechanics (I assume mostly combat) or just did your average snow level and then thought “it would be a waste to just drop all of it, but where can we stuff it… let’s do some matrix”. It is especially strange that, considering this was supposed to be a combat simulation they simplified the mechanics, especially considering that the game’s engine already had mechanics for looting corpses and stuff like that… instead you have to find the enemy’s weapons stacked here and there and everywhere.
I go for the explanation that someone gave in another comment: Bethesda people disliked all the rants and all the critic about that Fallout 3 felt too much first-person-shoot-y, and made a DLC that said: “Oh, really? Too much FPS for you? We disagree. It is an exquisite RPG, and here´s the proof: in this DLC, we made Fallout 3 into a pure FPS. Screw you, players. What can you know about playing games, anyway? Jerkz.”
Spoiler Warning is responsible for me reinstalling Fallout 3, starting a new character, progressing to level 7, and hitting an impassible crash bug that reminds me why I regret spending so much money on the game.
You guys are enablers, quit helping them to abuse me! :P
I can’t say I agree with all the critique, since you guys seem to have tendency to go a little overboard everywhere. For some of the plotholes you mentioned, there are actually more often than not some clues or hints towards what the purpose of some object is or why some things work the way they do, whether or not it really gives you a satisfactory answer. At least personally it gave more room for more apologetic thinking “Well okay, I suppose there’s some sense to this, somehow, even though I can’t figure it out”. I think it might have been a concious decision for Bethesda on not giving you all the info you might need to understand something, but instead chose to put it in the background. The thing is you often really gotta look around to get any answers, reading up the notes, looking up the computer notes etc. While understandably it’s not really what you’d expect and it can feel more like trolling to the player, it did make me develop a habit of trying to scour every possible piece of info about stuff, just so I could understand better and maybe make a little more sense of the mindless broken world. It even felt at times rewarding when they occasionally managed to give some sort of meaningful explanation to things.
Admittedly, it’s still just bits and pieces you mostly ever get, and there’s just maybe a bit too many blankets they try to pull over things. There’s still enough nonsensible stuff to give me a headache anyway though.. But you can always blame it on the weird retro-“SCIENCE!” or just the fact that it’s just a (Bethesda) game.
Just as an example: If you hack one of the computers in the Outcast Outpost, there’s a 200-year old note you can read about how the dude responsible for the project before the war basicly rigged the simulation just to have fun with it (apparently wasting millions on government funding while at it) and they even lampshade how this affects the “realism” of the simulation.
Wait,wait,wait!My comment about this being just a prank was actually true?!?!Wow…I mean…Just wow…
Anyhow,in both fallout 1 and 2 you have to dig around for info,yet somehow it doesnt feel as tedious as it does here.Nor is it this forgettable.
There´s a couple of reasons for that, but I think the main reason is that Fallout 1 & 2 didn´t try to troll the player as much as Fallout 3 does. Except for the combat mechanics, there were no identificable attempts of the developers to screw the player around; thing that Bethesda does in every game and at every opportunity.
The problem I have with those clues and hints you mention is that they are easily misseable or ar just plain half-baked ideas made in a hurry. Also, the fact that the developers decided to jerk around with the player (see above) makes looking for that info a horrible hobby. Remember the justification of why the player´s daddy escapes the vault:
“I couldn´t let Porject Stupidity die. The dudes in the wastelands need clean water, son! And it was your mother´s dream!”
Without taking into account that:
1) There are TWO (2) towns that have buttler robots that can hand you purified water everytime you ask him to. Why do we need a super-cleaning-waterplant if we have this handy-dudes?
2) Geiger doesn´t even move much when you drink from a 200 years old toilet.
3) Doctors can cure any ammount of radiation. You just need to tell them to stop charging 100 caps for it.
4) Did I mention the buttlers?
5) No one complains that irradiated water is OMG KILLING PEEPZ! Only the karma-dispenssers at the entrance of each cities remind you that “There Is a Water Problem, really!”
6) Megaton has a purifying plant alredy. Epic fail, dad, EPIC FAIL.
And that´s the justification for the main plot.
Megaton’s plant is a processing plant last I checked, rather than purification. I.e. it’s bottling the water or something. Besides, I don’t think those few pipes and pumps can clear radiation. You need tweezers for that (see: Doctors :P).
I bet they just throw some Rad-Away in the waterflow and are done.
Yeah, even if clean water was needed for drinking purposes and James wanted it to be free, why on such a grand scale? Why do you have to purify the whole Potomac? Dr. Li actually says that they had the water purification scheme down, they were struggling with scale.
If he wanted it for agriculture, why not just use GECK instead? And by the way, whatever happened to GECK? Did Fawkes fetch it during your escape? BRAIN…HURT…RAAAAAAEEEEEGGGG
The GECK was taken to the memorial by the Enclave after they took it from you and finished the purifier. They just lacked the code to activate the completed purifier.
Some guy that rigged the simulation was a general, writers needed to remind everyone that US military was lead by a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs cause, you know, its easy to forget about that.
I also usually come up with some explanaition for badly explained things but sometimes its just impossible. Sometimes their logic is so warped it leaves no room for additional interpretation or justification. Why does winning the simulation open the storage? Why did James go to GNR? Why he had to overload the purifier? What is the purpose of the purifier? Why the Little Lamlight exists? Why Tenpenny wants to blow up Megaton? Why…you get my meaning.
Little Lamplight is just another not-so-subtle reminder that Bethesda hates our guts.
I see it as a misguided attempt to make something like the Star Trek episode “Miri.”
Well FO3 is filled with homages, call-outs and parodies of basically every SF cliché out there.
OK, I’ll try my hand at explaining some of these, bearing in mind they’re all still stupid regardless.
Dad went to GNR to get his bearings and use Three-Dog’s invisible omniscient spy network to catch up on current events. The same spy network that updates Three-Dog on all your various adventures probably has a lot of useful info that Three-Dog himself is an idiot and would rather tell the wasteland not to feed the Yao-Guai, just in case they’re as stupid as him. That may be the case.
James overloaded the purifier because he’s an idiot. He may have been blind and unable to see his heavily armed and armored Son outside the airlock, prematurely senile, or simply desperate to escape the game by any means necessary. Note that these are not mutually exclusive.
The purifier freshens water on a massive and sustainable scale, essentially turning the mouth of the Potomac into a freshwater lake. I’d assume purifiers are exceedingly valuable in the wasteland or at lest only function on a tiny scale. Why he couldn’t have used say, a vault water chip, possibly obtained from the still functional and possibly open Vault 101 is not explained, but he is, as we established above, an idiot.
Tenpenny mentions at some point he said the town was a bit of an Eyesore and Burke assured him he’d take care of it. It’s implying Burke is using Tenpenny’s authority and resources to indulge his own dark desires. Tenpenny also says he asked Burke to tell the Megaton settlers to evacuate so it’s possible he didn’t even know he was killing them all. Now, you might wonder if Allistair Tenpenny, the only one in the wasteland smart enough to repair a tall building with good sight lines for easy defense, comfortable furnishings and a slew of gullible rich people he could extort, into workable condition would really be that stupid and gullible. Yes he would.
There are also in-game hints about the origins of Little Lamplight, it’s just when you think even remotely about it it makes either no, or very disturbing sense. How did they get more children when everyone has to move out at their 16th birthday being one of the more squickey thoughts. Others include, how the hell did they find Big Town when everyone who left died, presumably of radiation poisoning? do they seriously keep an entire population fed off slime that may or may not be Solyent Green? Are they that well hidden that nobody can gain access and kill/enslave them until they get to Big Town? The answer? Bethesda’s writing staff are either idiots, or simply failed to portray just how horrific and depraved life in those caverns really were. Both explanations mean they’re incompetent so I can’t really point you in any specific direction.
I hope that helped ;)
Well Lamlighters also inexplicably had a vault full of supermutants apparently unable to kill a bunch of children and… you know what? Im not even gonna bother deconstructing these. I already adressed some of those points somewhere else anyway.
As I was saying sometimes you just cant explain the stuff writers throw at you with anything other than “writers suck/everyone is an idiot”.
…Hey, does anyone tested one of those Stimpak mods? I am not interested in the whole survival pack thing, but a mod that just added some weight to stimpaks, and maybe turned them into “healing over time” drugs would be good, I think.
You can find one that lets you disable the primary needs functionality but keep the stimpack changes.
I dunno if it’s just me, but Josh’s voice is much louder and sharper than Shamus and Rutskarn. It kind of hurts my ears.
Other than that, love the videos! Especially the scorn. Especially since you explain WHY you think this or that is bad, and not just the usual internet style of “This sucks. Because it sucks. Total suck-fest”.
I think the humor is a little more subtle in this one. They’re training their soldiers to fight, Rambo style, even if all they have is a knife. It’s ridiculous- just like the logic behind the nuke shelters. But hey, there’s infinite health in the commie bunker right? All they have to do is get there.
Am I the only one who didn’t have a problem with anchorage?
You recieve the distress signal, they are calling for help with the supermutants, not opening the door.
The first guy, if you don’t kill him, sees your pip boy and realises you could help with the door problem, and they’ve been busy fending off supermutants instead of trying to break down the door.
from their perspective, putting you in the simulation has no risk to it.
I liked the shooty fun of fallout 3. This may be because I prefer shooters to turn based combat, but I thought it stood up as a shooter fine.
I also hope you guys realise that the people complaining about the shooting aspects were fans of the original fallout, the critics were mostly applauding a game that had taken the IP to a hugely more successful level. So a more shooty DLC really shouldn’t come as a surprise, it wasn’t done to spite you, it was done to appeal to the thousands who liked the shooting aspects.
I liked the gameplay of mass effect,and see how such a mix can work,but I still dont like the shooting part of fallout.Its just feels wrong.Maybe its just because its so buggy,I dont know.
As a gigantic FPS fan, I must say: The shooting in Fallout 3 sucks.Hardcore. No iron sights, aiming is ridiculously hard, your attacks seem to do either way too little damage or kill the enemy outright, and it just feels wrong. VATS is a titanic waste of time as well, slowing down every. single. shot. and 40-60% of the time bugging out, insisting that you have a 95% chance to hit from behind a wall, or a 0% chance when they’re in point fucking blank range. It’s awful, boring, and bugged. The shooting was the part I really hated about Fallout 3…in fact, why the fuck did I even play that game? Oh yeah, atmosphere was well-done. But that was it. Shooting sucks, writing sucks, leveling sucks, but atmosphere? Spot on.
FastVATS is a pretty neat mod. Makes Vats a looot faster (enemies move at half speed, you generally move at normal speed).
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1650
Sucks it’s a mod and not just an in-game option of sorts… Could be because Vats becomes worse (a little) by speeding it up; Enemies shoot more during one Vats round.
re Iron Sights: This is just my personal opinion, but I never found it really bothersome. Iron sights are just remodeled crosshairs to me (as well as a source of slow-down in most games). To each their own :)
Well the game was not made for you :)
I am an RPG fan, loathing FPS games (I enjoy ME2 immensely despite that, however) and I LOVE VATS. It’s the best thing since sliced bread.
I liked the idea too, I think it was a very smart move on Bethesda’s part. They managed to sneak auto aim into the game, incorporate all those skills and RPG elements into a first person game and make a gesture of goodwill to all the oldskool fans at the same time.
Now the execution can be incredibly frustrating, what with missing 3 times point blank due to weapon bias, screwy collision detection making you 95% likely to shoot a lamppost in front of you or toss a grenade under your feet etc. Still, its a refreshing break from thousands of cover-based-chesthighwalls shooters on the market right now.
As a shooter fan I disagree, I was willing to accept ‘Oblivion with guns’ as I’d never played either of the first two Fallouts. My problem with it was the sucky gun mechanics and the broken skill system that meant wasted points all over the place. Deus Ex melded weapon skill checks and shooting far more effectively by going for a ‘time to aim’ and ‘recoil control’ style weapon skills.
In Fallout 3 each shot is a dice roll affected by modifiers so shots either ‘hit’ or ‘miss’ leading to absurd 400 yard pistol headshots or point blank misses. In Deus Ex the weapon skills affected your speed in acquirin a target (a shrinking crosshairs) and the ability to handle recoil (how quickly bullets went off target and how quickly the next shot could be aimed).
They tried to make Oblivion with guns and wound up melding the worst aspects of stats based rpg combat with a poor FPS. If the enemy AI and animations had been of a higher standard then we would at least have had a good shooter with a poor rpg but instead we just have a poor shooter and a poor rpg. They need to retire this engine tech or accept it’s limitations and stick to melee combat which hides it’s worst sins.
Fallout 3 doesn´t work like that. Your (weapon) skill affects both damage per shot and the spread of the weapon. Each weapon has a base shot spread (how distant shots can be from the crosshair) and having a high skills reduces it. No rolls involved. In fact, there are no rolls in anything you do (maybe sneaking, not sure).
Surely there’re rolls for VATS targeting, for Speech checks and for chance of crits?
Of course. This is also why you never can get better than “95%”; there is always a chance for a critical failure, so to speak.
As for queuing shots, btw, the chance in VATS is only for the first shot in the queue. This is why you can burn half a magazine of bullets on a lamp post or a concrete corner of a building if your target moves the wrong way.
On the other hand it works the other way too: Mutie standing so his head only gives you 16%, but his left arm is 90%? Queue one shot on his arm and the rest on his head. He probably will turn around to face you when his arm is hit and that gives the headshots a much better chance to hit.
That was in the original fallouts. They probably kept the max at 95% because there´s no way to know if the target will move and get out of the line of fire, if your weapon is clippling through some asset, etc. Or maybe they kept it as another proof of “this is Fallout!!!”.
I can´t say if VATS uses a roll, but I´d bet it doesn´t. The only things I do know that affect it is the visibility of the body part you are aiming to, distance, and of course, weapon skill (which translates as weapon spread). Also, bad luck, for when the barrel of your weapon is clipping trough and object and hit it instead, or when the target takes cover.
Addendum: According to the wiki, speech checks do use a roll.
VATS do use a roll; I have missed occasional shots at 95% with a free standing target, no obstacles; the bullet just flies by.
Not entirely true.
While the weapon spread is affected by Skill, it also affects non-Vats auto aim. This is pretty much only visible at a long range. A registered hit will fly pretty much straight to the body of the target. A registered miss might still hit somewhere else, but due to the spread (ex. Miniguns are always inaccurate), it will miss.
In medium and short range combat, and especially with low-spread rifles/pistols, this doesn’t really show. A registered miss will still fly to the target somewhat, and can still hit.
I always notice this when trying to headshot something at a long range with Gatling Lasers/Vengeance (Minigun spread: 2.0 Gatling Laser: 0.5). ~Half of my shots will go to the body instead, some will fly off, a few actually go to the head. The 3 leftovers hit the limbs etc.
I have to say I’m surprised by how much you disliked Operation: Anchorage. I really enjoyed it- though I will say that it’s nothing like the rest of the game- it’s a decent, if basic, FPS quest made in an RPG. I enjoyed it for the variety if nothing else.
And yeah, I can see that the characterisation of many characters, especially the brotherhood outcasts, is off. But I think a lot of this comes down to the voice-acting restrictions that Shamus pointed out in his article at the Escapist recently. Further, I think that pretty much every RPG that allows you this much freedom is eventually going to hit that wall- because the only way to have both total freedom of action AND always convincing interaction with the AI is…well, actual AI. I don’t see that happening any time soon.
(That said, the outcasts are one of the few characters in the game that really annoyed me with their comments. For the most part, I was a lot more willing to suspend disbelief than you guys were, but the snide comments about banging rocks were really immersion-breaking when I was wearing T-51b power armour)
I’m afraid I have to disagree about Operation: Anchorage. While the rpg elements and the freedom given to you in fallout 3 is very important, and one of the main reasons why it is, overall, a good game, at times it does get just a little bit boring.
I can sort of see what Bethesda was aiming at with this DLC. When I get bored of the rpg side of things, all the story and decisions and all that, I just want to shoot some stuff, and that’s exactly what Anchorage lets me do.
The fact that the enemies level with you is even more useful for this. It doesn’t matter at what point I get bored, Operation: Anchorage will still be challenging enough to keep me occupied.
Despite all that, I will admit that all the DLCs, and this one in particular, are not worth the cost if purchased individually. I do find Operation: Anchorage fun, but not long enough or entertaining enough to justify the cost, which is why I’m glad I bought the game of the year edition, since I got all five DLCs for a much lower price.
I hope the quality of DLCs improves for New Vegas, though. After playing through Fallout 3 and all five DLCs, I know I certainly won’t be paying for the inevitable New Vegas ones individually if they’re similar to these.
Anyway, I think you are judging Operation: Anchorage a little too harshly. It is fun, and it’s a nice change of pace, but it isn’t much considering the price, and I’m glad that they didn’t make all of the DLCs in the same style as this one.
Oh, gods! This DLC is like… is like…
XCOM! It is precisely that! Bethesda showing us the exact worst thing they could do to the fallout franchise and it turns out it is the XCOM remake!