Fallout 3 - Can Bethsoft Do Fallout? @ Gameplayer

Dhruin

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Australian site Gameplayer asks, can Bethesda do Fallout?, a piece that chronicles Oblivion's faults before coming back around to say they are looking forward to Fallout 3:
Open world: Oh yes, Oblivion had a friggin’ massive world alright – around 42 square kilometers in fact. Unfortunately, this sense of openness and exploration was a little bit of an illusion. After witnessing the surrounding forests, roaming animals and sequestered fortresses, it became quickly apparent that everything started to repeat itself, ad nauseum. Oh yay, yet another bloody cave system, and then another fort with exactly the same interior. And don’t even get us started on the Oblivion gates….actually, they’re next.

Oblivion gates: How awesome did these things look? The only problem was that they led you to the most insanely repetitive areas in the game. Gameplay here consisted of teleporting in, running up a tower, opening some gates, perhaps running through some tunnels, running up another tower, killing a few Daedra and then nabbing the shiny key thingy to close the Oblivion gate. Awesome the first three times you do it, not so much the following thirty.

What will life be like in the various vaults of the Fallout 3 world? It better not be a repeat of the gate situation!
More information.
 
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Very nice read for me - they were critical without moaning too much.
 
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Very nice read for me - they were critical without moaning too much.

Well, it's nice to see a site capable of being critical of Oblivion, albeit that they applied a certain rule.

But other than that, they mostly seem to be using criticism of Oblivion as a springboard to say Fallout 3 will rock. i.e.:

There were a quite a few humorous asides in Oblivion (who managed to find the guy singing about cliff racers?) so we’re confident that the Fallout brand of humour is in fairly safe hands. A recent demo shown to the press also revealed that one of the stats that the game tracks is ‘corpses eaten’ – how morbidly intriguing!

All reports are that Fallout 3’s list of NPCs is much smaller than Oblivion’s, so there will be less people to interact with. What we hope this means is that your relationships with these characters will be much more believable. With around 40 different voices being used for Fallout 3, those embarrassing vocal mess ups we witnessed in Oblivion should be a thing of the past.

That said, the promise of multiple endings in Fallout 3 (over 200 according to Todd Howard, the Executive Producer of the game) indicates that Bethesda is hard at work on developing the intricacies of player choice in the game – such as good, neutral and evil decisions. It’s a promising sign.


Notice that last bit spouting the misinformation of 200 endings again.

I dunno, their heart's in the right place, but it looks like they're just being dragged to the same hype. In 2 years, we'll see another article like this, hyping TES V by comparing it to Fallout 3's failings.
 
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A good read of what? I don't think I've ever read an article with less information about the purported topic. I almost feel like I know less now about Fallout 3 than I did before.

Summary for those who don't want to read the article: Oblivion had these weaknesses. Let's hope Fallout 3 doesn't!

Indeed, we're all hoping.
 
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I enjoyed it and thought they managed to touch on a lot of points quickly and effectively. It didn't rant, and that was an accomplishment in and of itself.

One thing I didn't like was that the article seemed to give Bethesda a pass on quality that it doesn't deserve. To be successful, Fallout 3 should have reasonable quality, higher quality than Oblivion had when it was launched.
 
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