15 replies to this topic

[Strum la Frantique]

I've been sitting on this for a good week, thinking about whether it was worth moaning about (it probably isn't) and whether people would actually be interested this long after the game has come out. I've finished the main quest and all achievement side missions and been to a lot of the other locations in the game that really hold no bearing over the whole thing, I haven't been to all though. I just think though that a lot of reviews rushed their review and really didn't experience the whole game, and here's what I decided - the 70 hour long "whole game" is pretty shit, the 20 hour long short game is pretty good. There's too many bad design choices that really take a toll in the long run. Here's why:

1. The game's economy is fucked. This has been talked about a lot, money is simply too easy to come by. Ammunition weighs nothing, but fetches a high price - especially missles. So if you major in small guns and energy weapons, you reap in the cash for missles and flamer fuel, not to mention the 300 frag grenades you stumble across but are utterly useless - you're rich by level 10. In a game where the level cap is 20, it's makes the progress from 10 to 20 just a matter of time and patience. And this is only the ammunition, not to mention the cash you get from it simply laying around, pre-war money, pre-war books, scrap metal, locations after the the Reilly's Rangers mission, slaves, dead people (good or bad if you choose the perk, don't, you really don't need another chain to gain cash), nuka-cola, and expensive junk. It seems like when you get enough cash to last three game's worth, they give you another way to gain more cash. When every merchant sells shitloads of ammo and stimpaks - all of which are already found in abundance in the Wasteland, money will win you the game, and you have shitloads of it.

2. Health - if you die, you're an idiot. I finished the game with 250 stimpaks. I used 30 according to the loading screen. 30 stimpaks in 70 hours doing everything the game offers that is worthwhile, but I still had 250. So I could sell 220 and be even richer and play for another 70 hours. The was only on normal difficulty, but that's not normal. It's incredibly easy. Not to mention all the doctors around the place that are more than willing to heal you too, and with you shitoads of cash, you can afford it. Finish the Megaton mission early enough, buy yourself a med bay and BAM free healing for the rest of the game! Stupid.

3. The Map - The entire top half of the map is redundant. There's nothing up there really worthwhile to the game. The story takes you up to top half of the map once, and it's the very top left corner. Then they ask you to travel to the very bottom of the map - well ofcourse you're not going to walk that far, so you simply fast travel. What was the point of putting me up there? There's a side mission at the very top, but it's not a very good one. It's just a long trek out there, for nothing. There's raider camps everywhere, but they only serve to give you ammo and money, both of which you already have enough of, and essentially you spend ammo getting to the ammo to restock the ammo you just spent to get to the ammo. Why? And literally most locations on the map are a raider camp, and if it's not a radier camp it's a super mutant camp or a Talon company camp. All of which are essentially the same thing - a way to get restock ammo and health items. I cottoned onto this after going to about five arbitrarily named locations looking for story to expand the world's mythos, only to find enemies and a whole lot of fuck all. In the end, when approaching a location I just zoomed in with the sniper rifle, to scope if it was just another enemy camp - if it was, I walked around it.

The bottom right half of the map is cramped and chaotic with a confusing rail system connecting it all, if they had of just stretched that out over the whole map it may have been things more interesting. They did this because essentially you can a straight line from Little Lamplight to Rivet City and the main story plays out along this line, with a little bit of deviation. So people playing the short game only have a small way to travel to continue the plot (when they simply can't fast travel), which is fine, but it renders the top half empty and lifeless. The Republic of Dave is good for a laugh though, you know, before you kill them all.

4. The Story - The dad dies. This isn't even a spoiler, if you don't see it coming a mile away you're mentally retarded. He essentially breaks the rules of an open world game. The whole world without consequences (good or evil) is broken with your father following you around. Then he starts getting high and mighty on why you blew up Megaton, giving you a massive frown...well ok there's no frown, the facial animation system is shit and non existant. He had a disapproving tone though. It's at that moment you know his death is fast approaching. Within a minute he's dead. There's no way they were going to keep him along for the ride with his high morals and my complete lack of. Bye Dad, you won't be missed. Sadly, once he's gone (which he had to go), the story becomes utterly lifeless. It finally builds up steam and then crumbles in a heap as you're tasked in continuing his project, an option you have no choice but to accept as it's not even explained to you why you have to continue it and not one of the four actual scientists in the fucking room.

There is one cool chapter where you go into a simulated world which finally gives you an escape from the drab and dreary wasteland, it give you a court to play around in, and simply leaves you wanting more of this then the wasteland that you've been traipsing around for either 10 hours if you've been playing the short game or 55 hours like I had. It's all in black and white though, and boy, how I was craving some colour. Some red maybe? Anything but brown and grey. It's a nice little mission though with a cool villain (one of...two in the game). Once you're out though, there's no expansion on the research that was going on, just the start of a new chapter and your dad sends you on your way back to Rivet City...from the very west side of the map to the very east...fast travel.

When it finally ends you scratch your arse, get told what a bad little boy you were while brown photos (still no colour) recap some main events, and given the credits. If I wanted to be told what an arsehole I was I would have just rathered just kept the father around, atleast that way the story might have actually meant something.

You'd think atleast one of the side missions would have added atleast some plot depth to the Fallout universe but you just quickly lose hope when quests are reseolved and then never mentioned again. The Replicated Man is talked about non stop by many people and is a great mystery, once wrapped up, it's like he never existed. Once you complete it you take his side for a moral boost and an essentially - "point gun and win" weapon (which I'll cover in the next point), and then you fuck him over for the VATS boost from the bad guy - so neutral karma for the best gun and an awesome VATS boost. No penalty arises from this at all from other NPCs as they never talk about it. All the side missions are like this - Reilly's Rangers, you save them and then you never actually see them do fuck all. Apparently they do...stuff, but they're never heard from again. Maybe they pop up in an all too infrequent random encounter, but you never actually travel across the wasteland to see them because it's just a waste of time and ammo when you can just fast travel, and yeah when you do you never see one because they're too infrequent.

They explain where Super Mutants come from and it still ends with...nothing really. They still try to kill you. So the only story about the world that is actually worthwhile comes from the 20 hours game, the 75 hour game is just tedious tangents that lead to nothing but more ammo and moneyand sometimes a cool gun, most of the time a useless gun you already have a better version of.

5. Super Mega Ultra Powered Level 8 Chris - At level 8 I finished The Replicated Man, and scored the Replicants plasma rifle, the damage is great, the range is great (you don't lose hit chance percentage no matter the distance) andthe critical rate (a hidden stat) from this beast is off the charts. Super mutants become a walkover and die in either two hits for standard mutants or between two to four for more powerful ones. That if you didn't sneak up and critical stealth hit him from afar, which is incredibly easy with this gun. You've won the game at level 8. You find enough ammo for the weapon from vendors from level 12 onwards to make this you're main gun. Until then you just pull it out for anything remotely difficult.

You gain levels far too easily, the level 20 cap isn't enough and I hit it with a few more side quests to go and about three quarters of the main quest left. Like money, they hand out XP for anything. lockpick a door, hack a computer kill an enemy, finish a quest, hand in scrap metal, disarm a trap, disarm the weapon part of the trap even though you disarmed the trigger and bag extra XP, kill a random NPC = XP. Kill a super mutant in two hits with your plasma rifle and you bag 50xp, and that's a lot. The perks you get from leveling can either be extremely useful if you're smart and pick the few good worthwhile ones, or extremely useless if you pick ones that give you say an extra skill point from reading books, or double damage for killing insects...that already die in one hit.

It all adds up to a boring 75 hour adventure across a brown and grey landscape, ultra powered up, killing anything that stands before you and having more money and stimpaks then you know what to do with...because there's not a whole lot to spend money on. Or a pleasant 20 hour trek across a brown and grey landscape, not so powered up, not as many caps, and guns that will get the job done, but not in two hits.

In hindsight I would have rather done no side missons and just completed the main quest and had some fond memories along the way. Instead I took on countless raiders and super mutant camps, explored side plots that led to nothing interesting, and trekked across the map to find out that while there were quite a lot of locations, they were all carbon copies of each other and meant nothing to the main quest or side quests. With a bit more time, I assume a lot of these locations were actually meant to be apart of the main quest to flesh it out a lot more. Instead large locations like Evergreen Mills, and the Dunwich Building can be completely skipped over - they don't offer you anything, despite wastelanders talking about them. Who are the raiders, what's their purpose, who's their boss? I just invaded their fucking home base and all I find is an empty strip club and a friendly vendor? It's bullshit.

[Chillalex]

thats cool, and everything (I agree on most points I've experienced)
but you liked it enough to invest 70 hours and fully complete it?

confused.com

[ALL STAR]

You mentioned the levels going only to 20, they are incressing it to 30
http://kotaku.com/5127350/fallout-3-level-...dialed-up-to-30

[Spectre]

Loved the game. and i never got a pistol for the replicated man, jip...

[Strum la Frantique]

The level increase to 30 comes with the last DLC, what's the point? As Bethesda guys have said, level 20 is plenty powerful enough to finish the game, the increase to 30 is simply to give the diehard players some extra playtime.

Alex, yeah I regret playing for 70 hours. I kept on investing time in following tangents in the game that I though would be worthwhile, but everytime they only lead to ammo and stimpaks. The game kinda felt like a chore in the end, but I wanted to make sure I completed everything so I didn't miss anything, turns out there was nothing to miss. If I'd known that playing all the side missions essentially fucks up the entire game makes you an indestructible uber-god, I would have just played through the main mission with some challenge, and then shelved the game.

[Joe =/]

My darling Christopher, are you ever happy ? (Hug)

I started the game and went to the harder areas early so I died quite alot. I'm not an idiot, I just wanted a challenge so I killed a few of those armoured people and raided their base and got owned which was rather fun as I finally managed to wipe out everybody in there and find a mini gun for my troubles. I enjoyed all of the game and also enjoyed going for all the achievements.

The only thing that pissed me off was the extremely easy final mission, and fighting the same enemies over and over was a bit tedious after a while too.

Still, I loved it.

PS. I changed your sig to work with your new gamertag the other day, but errrr ... why did you change it to Chris 666 Rocks. What was wrong with Dr Jitz, huh ? I want Jitz Back.

[Chillalex]

Strum la Frantique, on Jan 11 2009, 04:17 AM, said:

Alex, yeah I regret playing for 70 hours. I kept on investing time in following tangents in the game that I though would be worthwhile, but everytime they only lead to ammo and stimpaks. The game kinda felt like a chore in the end, but I wanted to make sure I completed everything so I didn't miss anything, turns out there was nothing to miss. If I'd known that playing all the side missions essentially fucks up the entire game makes you an indestructible uber-god, I would have just played through the main mission with some challenge, and then shelved the game.

fair enough
Im in a similar position
completed it at the weeked (that ending just pops up on you; get to little lamplight and the game is as good as done. I'm considering doing the side quests but I'm not sure I can be bothered.
I liked the game though, and liberty prime is pretty funny, but the dungeons were pretty boring.

[Salazzle]

so uh, how's the 3rd person view in the game? is it like re4 or what?

[salizzle]

its pretty bad

[Joe =/]

Yeah it seemed really odd using the 3rd person view, I didn't like it at all, I seem to remember the camera being quite far away which I wasn't keen on. Having said that I only used it for about 30 seconds. Maybe try youtube for some gameplay vids ?

[Chillalex]

if you hold down the right shoulder button, you can move the camera in 3rd person (and bring it closer - default is mad distance)
but they didnt really put a strafe anim in so it looks well sketchy!
I used it because I liked to see my character - playing this game as an FPS didnt feel "right" to me.

[Strum la Frantique]

Yeah, you had to bring the camera in manually, RE4 close, to cover up the horrid animations. Once you did that, it was playable. It's doesn't even limit your view that much at all, compared to the first person.

Joe, my first few super mutants were hard, I took down two and a centaur with an assault rifle. From that battle I scored two Chinese Assault Rifle, repaired them together, and thus started my world domination. With that rifle in my hand I took on camps of 5 easily, I would have been about level 4. Possibly you made some bad weapon choices, or stat/perk choices that made the game much harder for you?

I ditched Dr Jitz simply because too many friends were asking what exactly a Jitz was, I wasn't able to explain it without looking like a massive loser. Yes I am embarrassed about all of you. So rather than face more 'Dr Jizz' jokes, I changed it.

[Joe =/]

For a long time I found myself very short on stimpacks, that could be why..

[Chillalex]

maaate
get to bigtown with high enough speech or level 10 + sandman and just brute force your way to level 20 - piece of piss

or if you want money for stimpaks, sell a broken copy of a gun you got, itll get magically fixed; buy it back, sell it back, buy it back low, sell it high... etc.

game is borked.

[Joe =/]

WELL THE WAY I PLAYED IT - I ENJOYED IT ! Screw you.

[Strum la Frantique]

Opposed to Alex, I set Charisma at one and never added points to speech. There weren't many if any speech challenges available in the first two levels worth of gameplay so I figured that was going to be the norm - it was.

The easiest way to get XP early on when you need it, is simply do The Wasteland Survival Guide quest. You bag so much XP in your travels completing it, not to mention it takes you to minefield, where you reap in mega XP. Earning mass XP and money simply by disarming land mines.

Or you could play like Joe, close one eye and play left handed.

EDIT - Sorry I added points to speech when I hit about level 16 and there was nothing else useful to add points to. Explosives!? Who the fuck wants to disarm the 5 explosive baby carriages in the game? I sold every mine I got because they were useless, and grenades were useless outside VATS, and useful enough inside VATS with a low explosives number.