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[Panthro]

Cant argue with B-P can ya?

I should be getting this as a gift at some point, because I really would like to see how it compares.

Having extensive experience in the original two games will perhaps colour my opinion slightly.

[hahajejeje]

Oh boy,how much time did you dedicate to this? did you write this or just copy paste?

[red_avatar]

You got some massive pink glasses on, Blood Piggy - I won't reply to every point you made but FO1&2 made a lot of the same "mistakes" as you call them including unrealistic radiation, copy & paste designs (I mean, come on, you got to have balls to accuse FO3 from cell design when FO1&2 had identical locations all over the place). FO1&2 had plenty of illogical sequences as well (a ship that still works after so many years just by plugging in some parts? The designers must have been high as a kite).

You seem to be massively blinded if you consider FO1&2 to be far superior - Fallout 2 had a serious issue with random criticals for example which meant instant death based on LUCK. You can't do much worse than THAT to be honest. And combat was a big part of the game so this flaw constantly popped up. Any game where you're unable to defend against immediate death deserves a slap and it's only because FO2 made up for it in other areas that I have not slapped it silly.

I do agree that the skills have changed but to be honest, I find this positive. Fallout 1&2 made the massive mistake of being nontransparent. Fanboys often forget this because they know those two games inside out but the truth is that assigning skills in FO1&2 was just guesswork. Next to the random criticals, it's the one thing I really hold against it (and against many RPGs actually). Some skills are potentially invalluable but end up being useless. I really dislike having to pick skills at the start of a game without knowing whether they'll be worth it.

I do realise some changes in FO3 may be considered 'dumbing down' but when you make the move to 3D and FPS instead of turn-based combat, there's bound to be changes that make certain things better and others worse. For me, the turnbased combat was flawed in the first place (see above) and the combat that replaced it at least didn't piss me off every few minutes.

Mods may very easily smooth over parts you don't like anyway, which happened to Oblivion too so look around if you dislike certain parts - there's enough Fallout fanboys that may have made mods to accomodate you.

[Panthro]

Originally Posted by red_avatar

Fallout 2 had a serious issue with random criticals for example which meant instant death based on LUCK. You can't do much worse than THAT to be honest.

Fallout 1&2 made the massive mistake of being nontransparent... assigning skills in FO1&2 was just guesswork.

I'd just like to pick up on these two points, for the first, I had assumed it was like that to make sure you weren't a superhero throughout, the fighting was supposed to be very difficult, and all the same rules applied to PCs and NPCs.

For the second, there was some information available, and off the top of my head I can only think of three of the skills that aren't useful, Traps, First Aid, and Gambling. I doubt anyone would put these skills as tagged, even on a first run through, and besides, they gave you three premade characters which show you the way.

[red_avatar]

I'd just like to pick up on these two points, for the first, I had assumed it was like that to make sure you weren't a superhero throughout, the fighting was supposed to be very difficult, and all the same rules applied to PCs and NPCs.

That's a very poor excuse for entirely random and unpredictable deaths. That. Should. Never. Happen. Full stop. It's one of the gravest gaming sins you can make. NEVER make you lose the game based on pure chance NEVER NEVER EVER EVER EVER. Well you get the point .

Realism has NO place in a game if it detracts from it - I already gave the radiation as example. Would you like a game where you contracted a deadly disease by accident, making you die without you being able to do anything about it? Well it's realistic but it it has no place in a game.

About the skills:
The computer skill was practically useless as well except for a few times and then it was hardly essential. I think one of the few times I actually could use it was near the end of the game. Combining combat skills is a bad idea as well - the game pushed people into using melee weapons at the start and if you focussed on another skill, it took a long time before you actually found proper weapons for that skill. That's poor game design - face it. The start is pretty damn dull until you got some proper guns. I died half a dozen times while fighting against those plants in the garden because my melee skill was so low for example.

The healing skill: add the doctor skill as well. You don't KNOW it will be useless. Many games have as best skills a healing skill (KOTOR for example) so how would you know? There's plenty of better ways to get healed up and I did end Fallout 1&2 with a gazillion stimpaks as well (*small dig at Blood Piggy*).

[Panthro]

Originally Posted by red_avatar

NEVER make you lose the game based on pure chance NEVER NEVER EVER EVER EVER. Well you get the point .

...Well it's realistic but it it has no place in a game.

The computer skill was practically useless as well except for a few times and then it was hardly essential.
...the game pushed people into using melee weapons at the start
...I died half a dozen times while fighting against those plants in the garden because my melee skill was so low for example.

The healing skill: add the doctor skill as well. You don't KNOW it will be useless.

To say the games have no flaws or balancing issues would be silly, and there are several things which I would have changed if I had been in charge.

You may dislike the luck-based death, but you could avoid danger to a certain extent, and there were tactics in play to minimize death by random-number-god. Worst example I saw was in (I think!) The Aethra Chronicles, where you could be killed by a random act for no reason. Made you Save Now, Save Often!

I think the melee aspect could have been avoided if you couldn't find so much damn ammunition in the middle + end of the game, but of course it was partially necessary for the Big Bad, which in itself was an avoidable flaw. I'd also point out that those beginning missions are totally avoidable, you choose the work you do. Also, there are at least two places to get a gun in Klamath, so that's not so much of an issue. This was never meant to be a kill-everything game, so you have to appreciate running away! It does feel very wrong at times though. I think they wanted to give the impression you were but a grain of sand on a beach, but it is a very harsh beginning in many respects.

I tended to play a diplomat, so the Doctor and Science skills for me were there purely to open up alternate dialogue trees (which they do quite well), and allow for a few different quest resolutions (mostly science here, can only really think of one doctor example).

I guess balancing is truly the hardest thing to do in a game, especially when you want to give the player as much freedom as possible in a particularly harsh and tough world. I'm one of those perverse people who find such peculiarities nice, but dislike being forced into big tough fights when I'd rather talk or run away. I'd have preferred less combat, or at least less combat with gun toting persons.

Anyways, I've rambled on, and possibly contradicted myself, and certainly lost my chain of thought, but I can appreciate your point of view, I hope you can appreciate mine, if you can dig it out of my demented ramblings.

[red_avatar]

What you say is all true but in doing so, you just confirmed my point . People who play the game the first time simply can't know any of the things you said. How do they know they aren't to invest points in melee? How are they to know you can find weapons in town X? How can they know they're not supposed to take on certain missions? People who have replayed the game will have a much better experience because they know the pitfalls and know the best skills to pick according to how they want to play. THAT was my point .

[Panthro]

I guess I was more used to fending for myself, I first played Fallout 1 in the middle east, where I had a pirate copy which had no movies or manual, so I was dumped in the first rat cave with no explanation, and I managed fine (not that one persons experience should be extrapolated into a generalisation!). In fact, I am currently replaying Ultima Underworld, which gives you absolutely no hints about what to do unless you read the manual (and even then, it may be sketchy, I haven't read it in a long while).
I guess these days its expected to be able to pick up a title and play without much hassle, but that wasn't always the case for whatever reason back in the day.
Oh and, it is possible to complete the game with Melee weapons, the Super Sledge being a favourite of mine.

[_r.u.s.s.]

Originally Posted by red_avatar

What you say is all true but in doing so, you just confirmed my point . People who play the game the first time simply can't know any of the things you said. How do they know they aren't to invest points in melee? How are they to know you can find weapons in town X? How can they know they're not supposed to take on certain missions? People who have replayed the game will have a much better experience because they know the pitfalls and know the best skills to pick according to how they want to play. THAT was my point .

From Pigggy:

How? Because they play the game for thirty minutes and realize melee is worthless, they play it for ten and they will understand that certain skills have no purpose because they're absolutely useless.
The fact is, unlike Fallout 1 or 2 where you can pick a skill and have it be useful from the start, such as Melee, Unarmed, Small Guns, or even Big Guns and Energy Weapons if you manage to stumble across the right merchants, Fallout 3 has worthless skills straight from the beginning, and this is entirely obvious when you decided you really wouldn't be using Endurance your first time through as a primary stat yet manage to beat up five heavily armed security guards with your bare fists and a baseball bat when your unarmed and melee skills are incredibly low.

You didn't prove any point, the only thing you managed to prove is that like most people who ignore Fallout 3's faults you seem to think that just because you can't pin down the game's exact problems and systematic failures then somehow it isn't truly a problem.
I've had enough of people telling me to ignore problems simply because they're "not a big deal" or because of some semantic bull**** nonsense they spew out of their mouth, then they act big because they think that their RPG neophyte ideals are somehow superior to the knowledge of someone who has been playing the genre since he was a god damn toddler and couldn't speak English. I've played every single Ultima, Wizardry, Might & Magic, Goldbox, Infinity Engine, Bard's Tale and countless rogue-likes, I've played most of them multiple times, I've kept an innumerable amount of notebooks, stat calculations, hand drawn maps and self written guides in order to maximize my playing potential.
Sure the average gamer won't be able to see Fallout 3's problems, but that doesn't matter, they exist, they ruin the entire game the instant you catch the slightest whiff of them. There is nothing redeeming about Fallout 3, it's a dead-on-arrival chunk of steaming ****.

My conclusion? People who don't recognize Fallout 3 as the crap game it is are the people who can't tell good games from the bad, people who go to Abandonware sites and private torrent trackers and think that everyone game is good because it's old and they can't understand the scale of quality in relation to a time period.
They're lost, it's like telling a Danielewski fan that James Joyce is better, they don't have any perspective. This is why gaming journalism is filled with absolute idiots, morons who were raised on crappy shooters on the PSX along with mediocre console RPGs and stupid worthless "cRPG" trash such as Planescape: Torment which are hollow shells of what the genre used to be.

Call me conceited brosef, but I've been through the whole stringer, played chock loads of P&P games as well, even wargames. I can tell what's wrong with an RPG from a slight glance, I can dissect them like a crime scene investigator on a murder case. And who is the suspect here? Bethesda, and they murdered Fallout and replaced it with a shifty character who happens to be completely abysmal at imitating his boss' victim.
Somehow you see fit to put words into my mouth as well, such as saying I complained about unrealistic radiation? Are you god damned kidding me? That was quoted directly from you nincompoop. If you're going to argue at least don't contradict yourself like a confused didactic prairie bird.

And don't you god damn ever accuse me of wearing "rose-tinted glasses", and don't you ever dare using such trite overused cliches ever again. Christ, you tell me I'm backwards.
I'm not blinded by nostalgia. Fallout 1 and 2's problems were excusable, they were bugs, they were unfinished quests and a few messy critical hit rolls. They weren't cache issues such as Fallout 3's abysmal caching which actual requires the player to manually, MANUALLY, in two thousand and ******* nine, clear the cache. Not only that, but none if its issues completely ruin the SPECIAL system as Fallout 3 does, there are no worthless denominators that defy the developer's goal of replayability. Fallout 3 has no replayability whatsoever, this would be obvious if you weren't bound by the "hurr hurr, new clothes make me special" disability that plagues so many superficially obsessed RPG "fans" these days.
Not only that, but somehow you seem to think that I'm complaining about realism in regards to the real world, yet you seem to ignore all my points about Fallout 1 and 2's verisimilitude, once again you shove words into my mouth and parade around on your Argonaut while searching for the blessed Golden Fleece that is defeating me with hollow jabs recycled from GameFAQs where the eternal newbies dwell and relish their tautly moronic discussions regarding realism in relation to the real world.

Fallout 3's treatment of Fallout 1 and 2 elements makes no sense, that's the end of it. There's no argument whether or not it's realistic because it "wouldn't happen in real life".

Then, you up the ante by assuming that I'm one of the jackals who panders to his own degraded sense of consumer loyalty by professing that mods will somehow fix all my woes regarding the game. They won't, I payed $60 for a piece of **** developed by a "professional" game studio, not for their abomination and a handful of poorly made mods by a gang of retrograded carpetbaggers who wish to make a name for themselves by excreting utter nihilism in the form of crappy mods.
Everything in Fallout 3 is dumbing down. At least you could die in the originals if you weren't paying attention. At least you could read the god damn manual if you wanted to learn what the skills did, ah, reading the manual, yet another long lost virtue of PC gaming.

You can't ever convince me that Fallout 3 is a better product, even as it is, even if you disregard it's predecessors, even if you actually read my post in its entirety and didn't ignore every single one of my major points, like, well, I don't know, how I said Fallout 3 is a massively inarguably odious black fiend of desecration in comparison to its competition. Mass Effect destroys Fallout 3, so does The Witcher, so does Drakensang, for god's sake, even Two Worlds is better than Fallout 3.

And guess what Red Avatar, most people who picked Medicine in Fallout 3 didn't know it would be useless, they didn't know that when they played the game a second time through on the Very Hard difficult because Normal was for ******* babies that it would be just as useless. They didn't know that their 1 Strength, 1 Endurance character would end up with a surplus of 300 weightless stimpaks that he would actually only use once or twice every three hours.

That's twice as worse as Fallout 1 and 2's apparent disregard towards the player's initial knowledge of the game's mechanics. Don't compare the games, Fallout 3 isn't a Fallout game, it doesn't even play the same, so how could you compare them at all? You said it yourself, it went isometric and turnbased to first person and real time, not to mention to stupid-half-assed-FPS-piece-of-junk-that-plays-like-ass-in-comparison-to-Deus-ten-year-old-Ex.

Stop contradicting yourself, and stop trying to tell me how this damn genre works.

[red_avatar]

Jesus someone needs to take a chill pill. To me, you're just like one of the headcases over at NMA who get worked up over a simple game because YOU disliked it. The nazis of RPG gaming world I call them because they like their RPGs nice and pure.

My entire point was that Fallout 1&2 made critical mistakes too - you can sugarcoat it all you want, but they exist. Come on, criticising FO3 for mistakes made in FO1&2? Seriously? If that doesn't reek of massive pink glasses I don't know what does. Not to mention the "copy & paste" design which you seemed to be blind to in FO1&2. Or the bugs in FO2. Or the situations where you can get stuck. Or the corruption of savegames. Or the crappy AI of team mates (seriously). etc. etc.

And I tend to be a lot less forgiving than instant unavoidable death because that's about the biggest gaming sin you can make - argue about that all you want, but you won't win on that account. No game should have instant death. The criticals should have been capped in the first place - a 250 damage critical from a weapon that normally does 15 damage? SERIOUSLY? I stick to what I said - at least combat in FO3 was more predictable.

There's plenty of stuff FO1&2 did wrong - and if you're going to criticise FO3, at least criticise it for NEW things it does wrong. And just go to the core of the problem, which you claim to see so clearly despite rambling off about this and that small insignificant flaw. I'll tell you what the major flaw in FO3 is: it tried to cater to too many people. That's it. End of story.

I do agree with the stats though since this was a logical result of the above - I would have liked them to have a bigger impact on the game as well but it was to be expected like I said - but it doesn't make it a terrible game. Not everyone is so anal about stats!

I know proper and balanced stats add a great deal of depth to a game but I never expected the game to have hardcore stats in the first place - I doubt it would even be possible in a non-turn based game. No Bethesda game ever had convoluted stats anyway. Bethesda even said in an interview that they didn't want more casual players to stumble over stats and while I can see why (there's a reason they're one of the only developers still making games for over TWENTY years) I don't agree with the decision either but all that doesn't mean FO3 can't be enjoyable as long as you don't EXPECT it to be similar to FO1&2. If they HAD catered to people like you, it also wouldn't have sold anywhere near the amount it did. I'd rather have FO3 than no game at all, thank you very much.

In the end FO3 is a very different game, one which I enjoyed because exploring a real true world is just fun to me. For me atmosphere, exploring & a good setting is what RPG are mostly about (and that includes meeting people & doing quests), NOT STATS. That's the TRUE meaning of RPGs and I felt FO3 did justice to this. If you don't enjoy it, fine. But don't call it a crap game simply because it's not a pure RPG in YOUR sense of the word. And I feel sad for you if you think you can degrade people simply for being more forgivable of certain elements than you are.

Oh, and calling Planescape Torment hollow trash? That explains why you feel the way you do. Incidently, few people will agree with you.