T w e n t y S i d e d
Every week we sit down to record this show and I think, “Dangit, I’m out of ideas. I have no idea what else I can say about this game.” Then when we’re done I feel frustrated because I feel like there was so much to say I couldn’t really fit it all in.
But next week. Next week I’m totally out of things to say. For sure.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
And for comparison, here is the art style of the original supermutants:
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I have to say that I _love_ Fawkes. My only regret is that his combat chatter is standard super mutant chatter and I hate that. Otherwise: He’s likable and damn near invincible. He’s awesome. I did make him wait from time to time when I wanted to sneak though. I suppose that’s his one real drawback: He’s one of the companions who can’t sneak.
Fondest Fawkes memory: Super Mutant Behemoth by the train tracks, that one metro area. Fawkes runs straight up to it like a maniac. The Behemoth pummels Fawkes and knocks him to the ground. Fawkes stands back up. Behemoth knocks him over again. Due to Fawkes’ limitless health, they got caught in an infinite loop. I sat and watched for a minute or two before using Fawkes as my “tank” and just damaging the heck out of the Behemoth until it died. Presumably from exhaustion.
Anyone else have good stories about Fawkes?
Well, he did get stuck on level geometry a lot.
I remember that time when we wento into some enclave base in the borders of DC, pouring with (three) enclave soldiers. We managed, after a ferocious battle full of mishots in VATS, with a (not) helpful brotherhood officer to get to their inner sanctum. There was a round glass chamber full of dead bodies, and a radio-transmitter said:
“Insert the code to not die!”
I was about to get inside the chamber when the voice added:
“Oh, and it´s full of lethal radiation. Like, really, REALLY lethal radiation!”
“Fawkes!” I called. “You are raditation immune. Go inside and Press 214 so everyone else Do Not Die!” The mutant stared at me, opened his mouth ready to impart his wisdom:
“Nah. I don´t want to take away your destiny.”
Then I shot him in the head. Five times. And burned his body until I had no more fuel left. Also, I threw his body parts to the water pool that was under the glass chamber.
Happy times!
That is -hands down- the best Fawkes story ever!
I just LOVE happy endings!
Bethesda really fucked up Super Mutants. In the original games they were threatening, dangerous and generally hostile, but not straight-up evil. Bethesda doesn’t really think in moral shades of grey, and they just finished up with Oblivion, so they decided that turning them until monstrous ogres was a good idea. And I guess they eat humans? Because that’s scary! Rawr! Maybe they made them into unthinking brutes because it would cover up how bad their AI code was.
Seriously I just have so much trouble comprehending how much stupid shit they put into this game and didn’t even question themselves on it. I don’t even mind the Super Mutant design even if it is a bit ugly; the fact that they’re in the game as they are is just painful to me. It’d even be okay if they justified it by saying that some of the remnants of the Master’s army moved east to DC, but no, they didn’t even think of that.
The Super Mutant origin in Fallout 3 is like some big mystery that’s built up from the beginning of the game, and then when you actually get to their lair, there’s pretty much no explanation whatsoever, and the entire plot thread is dropped. Like, I dunno, fuck, would it have been that hard to just do a silly tie-in with the Enclave? Like it was an experiment gone wrong or something? And what about the whole thing with them trying to take the White House? It feels like they had some ideas and just stopped caring.
In fact, that’s a really fun game to play whenever you’re raging about Fallout 3 (which for me is often): simply take any given situation and then ask the most obvious questions that come to mind, and watch it fall apart. Every single plot hole in the game can be exposed not by pouring over the lore and universe, but asking logical questions that would apply to almost every person. What makes it all the more tragic is that in almost every single one of these situations, you can do simple things to make it all logically consistent, so while it might be dumb, at least it doesn’t leave a fucking hole burned into your brain. Things like Megaton, Tenpenny Tower, Project Purity, Little Lamplight etc. would all be a lot easier to swallow if they just spent a few minutes coming up with decent justifications for them. I’m not a professional game designer, but I could probably improve the quality and consistency of Fallout 3’s universe exponentially in less than a day’s work.
AGHHGHHGH
This is why I am so looking forward to Obsidian’s work on New Vegas. I enjoyed Fallout 3 despite the fact that every minute I played of it made me feel stupider. If I can play New Vegas without feeling like I want to stab a fork into my brain all the time, then most of my complaints about the game would be gone. Nothing will bring back the old isometric Fallouts, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask for good 3D spin-offs.
Addendum: I was playing Fallout last night and discovered on my own that a high intelligence character can teach the Shady Sands farmer about crop rotation and get experience points for it. I think that this single moment in a game full of such moments demonstrates just how fucking banal Bethesda’s “new vision” of Fallout is, and how wretched and hopeless the human race is that they swallow it up like it’s the nectar of the gods.
Thats pretty much exactly how I feel about the situation.
An interesting thing about mutants in New Vegas is that Obsidian promised to have both old intelligent supermutants and new DC breed of mindless hordes. I myself was knocking around an idea for a scenario mod where an old field commander loyal to the Master and his ideas somehow ended up in the capital wasteland and started rallying the local supermutants to join the Unity. It would be interesting to see these two subtypes of mutants interact, especially sinse the new lore established (rather strangely) that all the smart ones are rejected by the dumb ones.
All in all, many of these gripes underline the core differences in approach to player interaction and overall design between the original games and the new Bethesda-style installment…if that makes any sense.
In short, in Black Isle games (or at least in original fallout games) your main mode of interaction with the world is dialogue. In Bethesda games its combat.
Everything in Bethesda´s remake is just a bunch of evil mooks. Even Three Dog is an evil mook without reason to exist. They just forgot to throw the Conservation of Ninjitsu too.
I agree that new Supermutant design is lame. Bethesda just sort of went with typical orcs/goblins/trolls/whatever “green menace” design philosophy, which we all saw a thousand times already. Old supermutants did have a distinct old comicbook style, in fact the very word “supermutant” is so redundant and ridiculous, you would only expect to see it in “Captain Cosmos and the Galaxy of Cosmic Space” issue 45 or somewhere equally cheesy.
The new supermutants are boring faceless orcs with very unclear goals and motivations, a lot like Raiders, Enclave and Talon Company. In original games all of the above (except Talon Company) were distinct factions, you could talk with their members and their leaders, find out their motives. In FO3 they are simply different types of enemies, no more distinguishable from one another than various demons in original DOOM.
To synthetise: they are basically different kinds of radroaches.
I just saw one of those comment-number-specific comment, um, commentaries that I’d never run into before: “Three comments. 33% of them are the most recent.” Well done, sir.
I miss the extro ending with 3-daag exploding. That was the single bestest moment possible in the entirety of Fallout 3.
At least until you remove the plot armour from children and explode Mayor MacCready’s pint-sized pants.
Oh look, you got the widescreen working! Huzzah! (What was the problem, anyway? For future reference…)
Viddler was a bit moody today.This is the first time I actually had to go there,because the embeded one didnt want to load,for some reason.And even then,I had to reload the page a few times.It sucked.
Anyhow,why is that failed supermutant radioactive?
I think it’s the room that was radioactive. I haven’t been there in a long time because…well, Little Lamplight, but I think some of the rooms were supposed to be leaking FEV. Or maybe that’s just how I justified it to myself…
So fev is radioactive?Why is fev radioactive?Its a virus,what does it have to do with radioactivity?Its supposed to make you immune to radiation(and kill you in other manners),not irradiate you.
And Im pretty sure that radiation got higher when they were near the body.But I wasnt sure that its because of fev,though that was the first thing that came to mind.
I´d say it´s a “engine” thing. The way to put radiation areas in the GECK works like that, if I recall correctly: the closer to the center, the more radiation.
Also, Bethesda retconned the FEV into a gas. Or at least the Eastern FEV is a gas. So maybe it´s not radiation per se, but FEV gas? They couldn´t bother to come up with a “FEV infection” status or anything because they are lazy (and are monkeys, remember!).
Indeed.Still,it would make much more sense to have fev drain your health than irradiate you.Just add a tape somewhere easy to spot that says fev is lethal to normal humans,and there you go,a sensible in game explanation as well.
If you look, there are little green floating particles in those rooms, same as in various irradiated areas around the game. So there’s some radiation coming from somewhere. Maybe the super mutants mixed the FEV with some radiation to create more super mutants?
The thing I didn’t understand, partially as a result of never having played a Fallout game before #3, is why the GECK is radioactive?
The GECK isnt radioactive, the puddles of green crap around it are.
But reading some of the entries in terminals in 87, they mention that the radiation venting system keeps failing, causing the chamber with the GECK to build up radiation.
Which begs the question, why put something that important in a room full of radioactive goo?
And if they didn’t do that, why is the GECK surrounded by radiation?
I mean, aside from Bethesda’s scripted reason to give Fawkes a purpose?
In Ye Olde Falloute supermutants were created by dipping humans into vats of green goop, supposedly a special coctail of chemicals, FEV and other scientific mojo. As I recall they had no radiation resistance to speak of (perhaps it was above average but nothing beyond that), were not irradiated during their creation and otherwise had nothing to do with radiation.
The Glow holodisks indicate that they are immune to radiation.
“The crossover has been completed and 15 chimpanzees were infected with batch 11-111. Growth and immunity levels are unprecedented. Attempts to induce cancers in the subjects through radiological and chemical agents were not successful. “
I have to admit i’m really confused. I thought that the supermutants in fallout 1 which were on the west coast were different from the supermutants her in this game on the east coast. They look similar but they’re different in alot of ways. supermutants is a pretty broad term. The Xmen that got beefed up in the weapon X program are basically super mutants. super mutants created by a stupid evil scientist can be entirely different super mutants than the ones created by a stupid evil compnay. they look similar because they are irradiated and grown the same way.
Word of God says they are different, but fails to explain why. How come that, being irradiated/inyected/bathed the same way makes them different? What´s in the east that makes mutants different from those in the west? Bethesda never offered any explanation, and leaves the players to speculate.
Warning: the Below links to TVTropes. You will lose time if you click it.
Our Monsters Are Different.
Incidentally, since Bethesda is violating the rules on Super Mutants from the original two Fallouts, this is also a Wall Banger.
The Above was a TV Tropes link. Neither Shamus nor I am responsible for your lost time. You were warned.
You know, one day I’ll have finally read all of TV Tropes three times, will know everything about every topic with all relevant examples, and all these link warnings will sound like so many empty threats.
One day…
Then I’ll add some superfluous comment to the list and you’ll have to start all over again.
I´m half-way there. Everytime I click a link I think: “There goes three hours of my life!”. Then I get to the article, read two words and: “Oh, I know this one alredy!” and then I go look for something I don´t and end loosing three hours anyway.
I hear ya. I clicked Krellen’s link thinking, “Ha, I can handle it, I’ve probably already read most of TV Tropes anyway. I’ll just read whatever he linked to and leave.” That was an hour and a half ago, and I’m still not finished!
I should start an online TV Tropes Anonymous chapter.
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
Did I say something I should not have, Shamus? Sorry if I did.
Its an automatic thing,but I dont know what triggers it.Shamus usually greenlit my posts that got tagged that way.So just wait for him to come and do his mod things,itll appear.
EDIT:Gah!I meant to reply to Audacity,not start a new one.Shamus,is it possible to add a delete command to posts?I know it wont be used often,but it can help in certain situations.
Or some kind of redirect.
Phew, good to know it’s automatic. I went and looked back through all my posts from the last month trying to see where I’d broken the rules. :)
What’s the wall banger? That supermutant “candidates” had to be relatively free of radiation?
Shamus went over most of the Wall Bangers in this video. Super Mutants becoming dumb, looking different, eating people, coming from Vault 87 – there’s actually very little the same between FO3’s Super Mutants and FO1&2’s Super Mutants.
When you violate your own rules for a Different Monster, you get a Wall Banger. It’s just stupid.
But technically,these arent their own rules.Bethesda just borrowed the premise of fallout and east coasted it.
They bought the rules. If they just wanted to make up their own post apocalyptic world, they didn’t have to use the Fallout brand.
Thats a bit moot though.You dont have to use vampires in your setting if you arent going to use stakes,crucifixes,etc.You can always call the monster something else.However,there are tons of different vampires circulating around.Some are good,some are awful.Some wouldnt even be recognized as vampires by most people.Still,its fair game to use them,and people accept the new rules.So why would money change that?Just because no one owns vampires and you dont have to buy rights to use them,why are they different then super mutants?
Besides,fallout 3 has so many inconsistencies with its own lore that there is no need to search for the ones between it and its predecessors.
Im not arguing that its good that theyve used the name fallout for this,though,because I dont think that.But changing the rules from the prequels doesnt make it a wall banger.
YMMV.
Well, YMMV.
As comparison:
In Fallout 1 one of the first super-mutants you could met a dumb supermutant in the first half of the game. However, that was the only dumb one. After that, you could get (disguised) into a couple of their bases and speak to them and most of them were able to talk like sapient beings, phrasing their words as good as all normal humans. You could engage in conversations and learn their motivations. You could met their leaders and do the same.
In Fallout 2, you could go to a town populated by them along with humans and ghouls. There wasn´t any dumb one there neither, and all could speak and be, basically, big greenish humans.
In Bethesda´s Fallout 3, super mutant talk and act like cliché fantasy tribal goblinoids. They speak in infinitive; the smart ones are either hated or are the leaders (we don´t see any of the later here); they are ravenous and completely evil without question (except the smart ones, because Evil is Dumb); they lack any motivation more than to be an obstacle to the player
TV Tropes = boring
Hey, this one is immune! Quick, grab him and get DNA samples, there might be a cure after all!
There’s a trope for that, isn’t there? Actually, it’s kind of good to know somewhere, someone on the Internet can avoid tvtropes’ amazing tar baby effect.
Bring out the teddy bears! We need more teddy bears!
Crap, now I spent an hour browsing TVTropes. Damn you for putting up a warning message so I don’t have anyone to blame! Daaaaaamn!
This applies fairly equally to both Wikipedia and TVTropes.
The most obvious difference is the pose. FO1 and 2 supermutants had the hunched over, head sticking out from the chest look that you otherwise only find in Warhammer 40k orks and termintors (to my knowlegde, I’m sure I’ll be corrected on that).
FO tactics and FO 3 super mutants, in an attmept to reduce the number of wireframe meshes needed for the improved graphics, gave them a mostly normal human skeleton with longer and thicker limbs.
So yes, these supermutants are really just big people with green skin. The originals were actual monsters.
They could still have animated the skeleton hunched over. Or just blended a “hunched” animation into all the regular ones. Shouldn’t be that hard.
The way you mention Vault Tec as being some sort of evil corporation just made me think that they would have been far better as bad guys rather than the Enclave.
On a side note (as I forgot to mention this in an earlier episode) I’m replaying FO3 and recently went to project purity. What I hadn’t noticed previously is the vast amount of empty bottles. I wonder if the problem with the project was that they spent far too much time drinking (leading to drunken sex, resulting in you!).
The “Better Days” tape you’ll find of James and Catherine supports that theory.
I always* thought James got drunk after coming back because he felt remorse for leaving his son in a (not anymore) sealed vault whose leader was a psyco. But Bethesda destroyed my hopes after I met with him.
* understand “always” as in “all the time before meeting Daddy Sue for the first time.” Thank you!
You kept switching to the Status screen to see if you had taken enough RadAway, but there’s an always-visible radiation-level dial on the upper-left corner of the PipBoy…
Alternatively, you can take radx and radaway from the radiation status screen the same way you can take stimpacks from the health status screen.
I managed to kill Fawkes by accident the first time I found him. In the very first combat we were in, the Mysterious Stranger popped up right behind him.
Most mysterious, we will never know his motives for killing the mutant, or how he got in the cell.
Unfortunately the download option on Viddler.com isn’t enabled again. An oversight?
FIRST thing that popped into my head after ya opened the door for Fawkes was, “WE MAKE GOOD TEAM!”
Someone needs to mod in the Heavy with all his lines. It will be amazing.
And that was an interesting romp through the vault.
WAS GOOD TRIP!
FAWKES IS CREDIT TO TEAM!
WHO SEND BABIES IN PLOT ARMOR TO FIGHT?
IT IS GOOD DAY TO BE GIANT META HUMAN!
Followed by NOM NOM NOM… MOIST AND DELICIOUS!
DON’T RUN! IT’S JUST RAD ROACH MEAT!
The Sword of Flaming Lawnmower Blade’s probably having trouble since it’s condition’s red-lining. Fun to see the flamethrower though.
I’m also amused by the fact that you spent most of the episode ragging on the art design by a company that’s famous for coming up with worlds. Ouch.
I was messing around in Shady Sands in the original Fallout , and yeah, the desert’s more colorful than the gray-brown smudge.
You realize that with the GECK being in Genesis mode, we know that LITERALLY all Bethesda did was read the Fallout 1 manual’s GECK ad. :)
Though you know what would be decent to make the Genesis-device death more interesting? Show some trees sprouting, but then they dry up, just to remind you of what is, so I’ve been told, the game’s main point.
I think it would have been way sensible to make it a Jack-in-a-box. It would have been amuzing too.
I want to know how you’re supposed to use the blasted thing if it kills you when you turn it on!
EDIT:I need read things more thoroughly before posting. Daemian preemptively ninja’d me by twenty-four hours.
This thing always bugs me when I see it,but I always forget to ask it once the video is over:
Why the hell is geck working instantaneously?I mean,you build this thing that will destroy everything in a radius around it,and recreate something new,and you dont build in a timer?Why?Thats like making a hand grenade with a fuse of 0.5 seconds.
That’s done so people don’t get cold feet and rob the future of goodness due to having time to reconsider.
They thought that putting a lot of popup windows would be just as good!
Seriously, though, I´m sure they did it like this because, if the GECK had a timer, you could:
1) Ruin their AWESOME plot of betrayal, sacrifice, awesomeness and sacrifice.
2) They´d had to remake the whole world to make it blend with the player selected GECKified area, which is a lot of work.
Was it really that hard to insert a single line saying:”The timer is stuck at 00,so youd kill yourself if you activate it”?
Thats the worst part of fallout 3 actually:There are so many plot holes that can be patched with minimal effort.
But then they´d have to add a “You can´t seem to figure out how to change it!” and those of us that had 100 science would go nuts!*
* It´s not like we didn´t go nuts somewhere else by the lack of options and explanations, of course…
Why?You can have the best mechanic in the world,but ask him to fix a car without any tools,and hed never be able to do it.You need skill,tools and material in order to fix something.If you have just skill,there are loads of things that youll never be able to do anything with.
You need tools and materials to set your alarm? ;)
If it breaks,yes.
Isn’t there a settler mod? One where you can establish new towns or something? On the other hand, from what I’ve understood Bethesda didn’t bother to apply the unofficial bug fixes and other patches for the Fo3’s engine either.
Any chance you could also upload these videos on a non-streaming site for direct download, just for the four or five other blokes like me whose internet belongs in the stone age?
Fawkes is basically the thing that will not die, it’s how he’s used by the plot in the vault (getting the GECK using his radiation resistance / immunity). What really ticks me off is that since rad-resistance is clearly a role he fills very well, he still will not fulfill that role at the end of vanilla Fallout 3 by activating project purity no matter how much sense it makes for him to do so.
Essentially you get to that point in the game with Fawkes as your companion and he inexplicably railroads you into killing yourself since that’s what the main good plot had intended.
I’d love to hear you guys harp on this.
Of course, Broken steel fixed that. And they are using it.
But who will fix the broken steel??
Sorry about that, I just had to put my thoughts into text…
Anyway – Using Fawkes, at the end, is such an obvious sloution that they should have either let you do this or write some sensible excuse like: You need non-mutated human DNA to activate the purifier, or his fingers are too big for the button etc… etc…
But nonesense ending actually makes sense in the bigger nonsense, which is the Fallout 3 universe.
Meh, I actually kind of like Fawkes’ nonsensical ‘No, I don’t really want to’ reasoning. It’s like Bethesda’s final extended bird flip to the player; after griefing them throughout the entire adventure, with everything and everyone they can think of, they end with ‘There’s this guy who could activate the final switch and live, so you wouldn’t have to make the stupid arbitrary moral choice, but he’s not going to do that, neener neener neener!‘.
As a matter of fact it would be fairly easy to work around the whole “Fawkes doesn’t wanna do it” thing. Make it pretty much anything BUT radiation: high temperature, low temperature, explosion, pressure, wave of energy Y, toxin X, flesh eating nanites…
Hell, the purifier is supposed to operate with GECK, the opening of which, on this coast at least, is deadly to anyone in the vicinity. Just say that the “containment field” that was supposed to contain whatever hell it is that the GECK unleashes is leaky or faulty (consider: the GECK was not intended as a component in the original purifier design, the technical solutions for its implementation could be less than perfect).
But noooo, for some reason Bethesda got fixated on the word “radiation”, because it sounds so very ominous and deadly. Or something.
An even easier solution would be to lock the followers away for some reason. Have them guard the entrance, secure the basement or just plain cut them off with a ceiling collapse Half-Life style. One might argue that its a cheap plot device, but after TWO bogus capture sequences anything goes.
I disagree. They are not fixated with “radiation” because it´s ominous and deadly. They are fixated with it because, for them, Fallout 1&2 were all about radiation!
And Nuka-Cola!
And supermutants!
And ghouls!
And Water Issues!
And vaults!
And Etc.!
They also have the “Trouble on the home front” quest which seemingly is only there for two reasons.
1. to grief the player
2. to copy the fallout 1 ending.
Indeed.Just like with fev being radioactive for some reason.
I always assumed that as the enclave had all the vault codes and vertibirds (plus advanced medical facilities?), they could just rush through the radiation on top and get in that way.
Still does nothing to explain the convenience of the ambush or its unfightability (you routinely defeat enclave soldiers at that point if you hang around DC too much).
Well they do all have the super Rad-X…
On photo-realistic-ness: I think the reason Oblivion worked is that it is a fantasy world. The world actually has that “feel”, so even where there are contrast issues, it really doesn’t (to me) dampen the whole experience. The problem with FO3 is that this is a post-apocalyptic “real world”, where contrast DOES matter.
On the Vaults: I actually think they got the Vault design right. It has the look and feel of a Cold War era bunker or missile silo – though there should be more spiral staircases.
Loving the series, Shamus. It’s inspired me to pick up the Fallout series myself, having never gotten into it. Maybe if there’s a steam sale some time.
Fallout 1 and 2 are each only $6 on GOG.com.
And they’re DRM free! What a deal, make haste and purchase them right away, the power of capitalism compels you!
The only down side is possibly having to mess with the graphics settings in (I think) an INI file or something to take full advantage of your screen.
You should also probably download the Fallout Restoration Project mod which adds more to the games and (I know this will irk some fundamentalists out there) repairs some of the really annoying bugs in the code.
And by the way, for all the talk about how broken F3 and its skills are, go read the Vault Wiki and look at the walkthroughs for any Fallout game. The stats/skills are just as exploitable and broken in the original games as they are in F3, if not more so. I suppose you could argue that since Fallout was originally an adaptation of GURPS, min/max/munchkining is how you play tabletop games, but it’s still looking like rose-colored radiation goggles to me.
But in Fallout 3 you can´t make different concept of characters. That´s why their remake of the system sucks so much. The only useful skills are directly related to combat: you can only make a warrior, or a warrior-ess. And even if you don´t your character can overcome all situations even without putting any point in combat related skills.
-Speech´s only use is to get better rewards (and avoid Lil´ Lamplight). -Medicine only effect is that boost stimpacks, which is useless unless in large quantities. By the time you get it to max you could have maxed out small/big/energy guns/melee/unarmed/sneak and be better at combat or avoiding it (and thus requiring less stimpacks).
-Barter is useful if you want to get the best equipment early on: but then, the best equipment can´t be gotten from merchants because their stock is level dependant. Later on, you will be swimming in money.
-Science is used as another kind of Lockpick.
-Repair is the most useful skill because it let´s you save lots of caps in shop repairs and lots of time in trips to the town to repair. But has no use besides that. It´s an indirect combat skill.
-Sneak is another indirect combat skill. You can avoid fights or use it to overpower your enemies. This is the only I can´t complain about, really. Except the lack of quests that require sneak…but for that matter I should complain for ALL the lack of quests for the OTHER skills.
-The others are direct combat skills and they are useful only in that. And that is the only thing Fallout 3 offers: combat. Thus, they are the most useful skills since they directly affect your performance.
I´m so about to reinstall this and play through it without allocating any point in combat skills to see how many levels it takes to me to have no other choice but to put points in there (since you can´t choose to level up later, you must do it “RIGHT NOW AND THERE!”).
Or maybe someone wants to save me the hassle…?
Choose the Fallout Wanderers Edition mod (which you can get from Fallout3 Nexus and possibly other places).
It makes repair more useful, money and ammo more scarce, combat harder and a whole bunch of other stuff.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2761
So we need the modding community to fix their system. Such great developers!
Also, modding it makes my copy crash 3 out of 4 times from 1 out of 4.
– Speech: How is that different from F1/2? You get more options to get more stuff or talk your way past people.
– Barter: From the Ultimate Fallout Guide: “You don’t have to trade much, and CH is more important for that anyway.”
– Science: Again, not much difference here. It lets you hack computers in all of the games for goodies, info, or other results, and gives you the occasional speech option.
– Repair: Untrue.
– All other skills (lack of use): Same as it ever was for Fallout. Your point?
– Putting no points to combat skills was never a good idea for any Fallout game. Try it on any of them; I think the radscorpions would appreciate it.
-Speech: If we take it on its mechanical sense, then yes: it´s just there so you can skip stuff and get better things via simulating your argumentation skills. I should have blamed the dialog quality instead.
-Repair: I recognize my mistake.
-Science: I differ in that “it´s not much differnece.” How many computers sitting on a side of a door did you see in the originals? (Also, I forgot to mention that science in fallout 3 also is useful to avoid turrets, my mistake).
-On combat skills I wasn´t trying to criticize their lack of other uses (though it sounded like I did. Apologies.) I should have said that they are the only ones that may be needed to enjoy the character.
-On other skills not being useful: they weren´t in any of the other fallouts. Let´s not argue that. So it´s totally justified to Fallout 3 to perpetuate their mistake, right? I bet because the “Look! The useless skills from the originals are still useless! This is Fallout!” thing.
Well, now our arguments have diverged. I’m not arguing that F3 is amazing in the storytelling sense. I’m arguing against everyone saying that compared to its predecessors, F1 and F2 were superior games because of their mechanics.
I’m in general agreement that the story in F3 stinks, though I recognize the limitations of having to cinematically present a game, record vocal tracks, and still have a storyline that can appear dynamic while not needing a bajillion possible responses from each character. This is something that we’re going to have to get used to, at least for mainstream games, until someone can develop a decent voice modulation module that can generate dialogue on the fly, or at least, change the inflection to match the situation.
But anyway, my brief is that for all of F3’s mechanical flaws, the two original games weren’t much better. It was still a game that pretty much came down to maxing skills in combat, lockpicking, or hacking computers to get through the missions. Sure, F3 should have improved on that, though they also had the task of coming up with the whole engine as well.
Which is, as I’ve stated before, why I’ve got high hopes for “New Vegas,” since Obsidian didn’t have to re-invent the wheel (except for the character wheel, rim-shot). I wouldn’t mind seeing this as a trend in RPGs, since the graphics and gameplay are usually satisfactory enough for gov’t work: I’d like to see more engine licensing to other companies who can concentrate on creating better stories for the games that companies like Bethesda and Bioware make. For all the love that’s heaped on Mass Effect, I was let down by how derivative it was, and how it also screwed up its main plot. Giving someone else a shot with the game engine could yield better games at lower costs (to the developers, anyway), which is another issue the games industry currently has.
Perhaps nostalgia IS blurring our vision a bit but consider this: in olden games you could have many various character builds and they will play quite differently. In Fallout 3 this isnt really possible because the whole rpg aspect is rather homogenized.
Stats and skills arent very important, you can have a character with 1 point in every SPECIAL stat and 15 in all skills and he would still have decent health, average carrying capacity and halfway competent handling of all weapon types, reducing build choices from defining your character to being sort of a cherry on top. Josh demonstrates my point by having a melee based character succesfully use assault rifles, grenades and energy weapons (gauss gun doesnt count because all long range weapons are rubbish). There arent that many builds you can create due to a narrow set of skills, and they all play the same anyway, there is no real difference between a sneaky sharpshooter, an educated energy weapon specialist and a harismatic buisnessman.
From the Fallout Guide:
First of all, none of that “theme character” nonsense, like tagging Science and Repair and choosing “tech perks” like Educated and Mr. Fixit, or tagging Sneak and Steal and then choosing “ninja perks” like Ghost, Pickpocket and Silent Death, or even tagging Speech and Barter and picking “diplomat perks” such as Presence, Empathy and Cult of Personality. Well, of course you could do that (and probably even finish the game), but in that case it’d be pointless for me to tell you what to do. Also I don’t think you could squeeze as much out of the game as you could with a generalist. For one thing, those options will be more or less available to you anyway by the time you need them. For another thing, there are very few advantages (either minmaxing-wise or role-playing-wise) to be gained from being an “expert scientist” or “expert sneaker”. Really. Wonderfully flexible as the SPECIAL system is, some characters are bigger than others.
About the only difference I’ve ever noticed in the games are based on intelligence (where you get the “stupid” options) or how good your speech skill is (more quests, more options for outcomes). None of the missions or goals change, and you’re winding up shooting stuff no matter if you’re trying to be a doctor, a ninja, or a lummox.
As for Josh’s gun skills, he doesn’t have zero skill with any given weapon (which few games have, actually. Usually it’s a class barrier, which is just as annoying. Yes, gun skills are handy and make sense, but it’s not hard to figure out ‘point and pull trigger’ to at least start firing). We’re now getting into RPG rules lawyer territory as for how games would handle unfamiliar technology/weapons. M’self, I like the old 1st edition Gamma World die-rolling charts for figuring out if your character could use a given item.
Well, nobody is saying old games were perfectly balanced, not all skills were equally usefull. However, they were there, they allowed you to create and try out various exotic builds, not just weaponskill + repair + lockpick.
The guide quoted above is probably intended for powergamers and minmaxers trying to create a perfect character capable of wiping out everything in the world or whatever, and those guys will find a way to “beat” rock-paper-scissors given enough math equations and social surveys. The important part is “wonderfully flexible”, not “some characters are bigger than others”.
The thing is, while not equally powerful, different builds were viable and the game played differently each time. Some doors opened and some closed for you, depending on your skills. You could talk your way trough most of the quests (with dipomatic solution often being the best) and avoid most of the combat with high enough speech, or you could try to use energy weapons with a skill of 20 but your chance to hit would be absolutely pathetic.
In FO3 every build is practiacaly the same, you may get a bit less loot if you dont pick science/lockpicking and miss a few insignificant shortcuts and some cash rewards if you dont pick speech, but at the end of the day you can just pick up any weapon you like, skill or no skill, and go kill dudes. Besides fighting there is nothing else to really do, and it plays the same way no matter what character build you have.
You can do the same thing in F1/2: There are books. Your skills can go over 100, you never had “zero” in any weapon skill (or any other skill, for that matter). Do you want to be a Doctor specialist in F3? Knock yourself out. There’s no difference between being given a speech check in F1, 2, or 3: The results are always that an avenue of play is opened or closed.
The guide tells you the best way to play through if you want to be capable of doing most everything. But the point stands that making a specialized build didn’t matter, and was often counter productive and a waste of time. In all three games, the only person your build matters to is you; neither game rewards a ninja, a doctor, a tech-head, etc. specifically, offering them a unique game path.
Perhaps the only difference is that F3 can have no “ending” unless you shut it off. Ironically, for all the complaints about how F3 ended at all, instead of letting play continue, the other two games not only had definite endings, there were time limits on how long you had to complete the game. So, yeah, if you have an open-ended world with nothing preventing you from looting every inch of it, you can munchkin a lot easier, but it made no difference in any of the games: You got through things by killing stuff, unlocking stuff, and hacking computers.
http://i535.photobucket.com/albums/ee356/jackbwise/shamus.jpg
Shamus! Shame on you!
While it was meant in the film to be a nod to what you think it is, Shamus’s usage in this case quite clearly makes it a nod to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, not what you’re thinking.
Gutter-brain. :D
I thought he was scorning me for doing a Bill & Ted reference.
Hmph. Young people.
They totally need to get off our lawn.
I assumed you were going to have the enclave capture sequence to end this episode, but you cut out right before it!
Now I’ll have to wait to post my rant on it.
Now that you’ve got me thinking about it, what the hell is up with those radioactive FEV test-chambers?
FEV’s only connection to radiation is that it screws up the process. In FO1 the Master’s plan hinged on getting hold of a pure, onspoiled vault, as the accumulated damage from living in a radioactive environment messed up the mutation process.
Also, the Master’s original plan was to improve every aspect of humanity, not only strength and resilience, but intelligence and longevity as well. He did this by use of an essentially unmodified strain of FEV that he found in his “birthplace”. The scientists in this vault had easy access to genetically pure(more or less) specimens, and yet the only thing they could produce was dim-witted monsters. As I recall the facility that produced the Master and his people had been active before the bombs fell, thus the folks in vault 87 should have had access to the very same virus and should have been perfectly able to produce the desired supermen.
It does make some sense that the FO3 mutants are imbeciles, since most of them were just your common irradiated wastelander, and thus would produce inferior mutants, but it still doesn’t explain why there isn’t a single proper mutant around(bar Fawkes, but s/he was a fluke, apparently).
To the guy at the top that sez there is no explanation to supermutants, that’s not true, in vault 87 in the test labs there is a terminal that is talking about the progress of the fev supersoldiers, and the supermutants talk about “the green stuff” during idle chat. It’s also why supermutants kidnap humans, because they are making more mutants! you also find out that centaurs are made by supermutants. ( Oh ya I know everything about supermutants!) :)
THIS is one of my most hated plot holes in Fallout 3, partially because of how it exemplifies all that is wrong with the game. FEV increases the subject’s strength, endurance, radiation resistance and INTELLIGENCE. Super Mutants are, naturally, SMARTER than humans. The problem is that FEV itself is affected by radiation, so radiated humans (i.e. EVERYONE in the wasteland, since they are all getting a slight background radiation all the time) get DUMBER. That’s why we have mutants like the Lieutenant in fallout 1 and MArcus in Fallout 2 (and the master, and Harold) while the average Super Mutant is… well, a Dumb Dumb. This isn’t some hidden lore, it’s kind of a big plot point in Fallout 1 and the reason why YOU are important to the Master (YOU know the location of a closed Vault, with 1,000 completely un-irradiated people ready to become brilliant, super soldiers for his cause) AND why the game still has a time limit after the water chip is found.
But if Vault 87 is a VAULT-TEC experiment, then every single person in it would have been 100% un-irradiated and thus, BRILLIANT. Vault 87 should have been LITTERED with brilliant Super Mutants. Probably actively trying to find closed Vaults and Enclave members to bolster their ranks.
The problem isn’t just the writting, or ignoring the lore. The problem is the reasoning WHY. Ways I look at it, Super Mutants serve NO PURPOSE to the story. They could have been replaced with ANYTHING and would have fit the plot jsut fine. Super Mutants were used just to justify the Fallout name on the box. The same goes for the Brotherhood, Enclave, Harold, and just about anything that relates back to the original Fallouts. They weren’t put here to enrich the game world, or to move the plot forward, or because they, god forbid, MADE SENSE. They were put here because, while it would have been completely logical and sensible to have the East coast have its own factions and heroes and villains, then this game would not have even a tangential relation to the original Fallout.
Seriously, replace Vault with Shelter, replace Brotherhood of Steel with Good Guys, Enclave with Bad Guys and Super Mutants with Generic Cannon Fodder and you could NOT tell this game was Fallout. Hell, if no one mentioned it, you couldn’t tell that the bombs dropped 200 years ago! It’s almost like Bethesda made the game BEFORE buying the Fallout IP and then just molded things around it so they could sell the name… And this Vault 87 business is the perfect example of that.
Sorry about the rant, and REALLY late one at that. It’s just one of those things that piss me off… Now I gotta go back to Fallout: New Vegas. Y’know, what Fallout 3 SHOULD HAVE BEEN…
I find it kind of amusing, on some meta level, that as I watched you guys play through the game, I found myself wanting to pop this game in again, despite the fact that I’m neck deep in New Vegas, which is a far superior game. Then you guys got to Lamplight, and I remembered why I buried that game a long time ago.