Fallout 3 - Creation Kit and DLC

JDR13 said:

but the majority of us don't feel that FO3 needs any fixing.

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Simple fact; I've been talking to the head of Fallout 3 Nexus lately and he was completely taken by surprise by the mass of traffic to his site. He ran TES Nexus before, and to his great surprise F3N got the same traffic as TESN does from day 1: 50k visits a day. That's twice as much as NMA gets, and almost as much as GB does, it is, in fact, a pretty huge number for a recently launched site, and all they offer is mods - dark0ne having decided some time ago he doesn't feel like competing with the Vault or NMA on Fallout 3 info.

This reminded me of one of the awards Oblivion got: it got a GotY from some site, and one page later that site gave the mod of the year award to Oscuro's Overhaul mod.

It's a kind of having your cake and eating it situation. Why is there such massive interest in mods if the game is so perfect? Why is Oblivion's fanmade patch probably the only one I've ever seen that has a longer fixlist than Bloodlines' fanmade patch? How can you claim a game is the greatest of the year and then claim a mod that overhauls it is the best of the year - if we were talking about a massive mod that keeps the core but adds a lot of stuff then sure, mod of the year + game of the year, but OOO is very specifically aimed at picking up the broken pieces of Oblivion - like level scaling.

Also, Fallout 3 does in fact need a lot of "objective" fixing but that's not the modding community's job. We're talking about a game that is so unstable that it manages to crash on Xbox 360/PS3 and while it runs fine for some, it has a mass of problems for others. But hey, Bethesda is hard at work on DLC rather than having put its entire team on patching this buggy mess, because there's no money in patches I guess? As a consumer, that does annoy me.

Oh, and some things in the game are actually pure fixes of the easiest sort: I've already seen animation and texture mods that do not do a lot at all, they just put in stock animations or put the Fallout 3 textures through a filter and then place it back - simple fixes for a game that appears to have been tweaked down for the Xbox.

I mean...really really? I'd say there's a ton of dumb-ass design bits in Fallout 3 just like there was in Oblivion, and you don't need to dislike the game to prefer one or two fixes.

Oh come on, buggy mess? Are you serious? You think this is buggy what have you played in the last ten years? I have yet to crash on the pc, that is a amazing when you look at the current trend of games.... I won't get into the other parts because in some ways you are right and some ways wrong, just because alot of people liked a mod doesn't mean its better for everyone, since there is no perfect game.

rune_74 said:

Oh come on, buggy mess? Are you serious? You think this is buggy what have you played in the last ten years? I have yet to crash on the pc, that is a amazing when you look at the current trend of games....

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It is a guaranteed crash on exit for me, and often locks up while loading. But honestly, I hate it how whenever someone mentions bugs people always go "but I this" or "but I that". First time I played Bloodlines with the official 1.2 patch it ran fine for me, does that mean I'm not proclaiming Bloodlines to be a bugfree game? Heck no.

It's impossible to really measure "bugginess". I should note my computer is lo-end but as clean as gaming computers get in updated status of drivers and in avoiding possible software conflicts. Fallout 3 is the buggiest game I've played this year, and that includes me finally getting around to the buggy GTA: SA port. It's not the buggiest game I've played ever, obviously, but I've played some fairly unpolished releases this year, yet Fallout 3 takes the cake. It's no shock - Oblivion was a mess too.

But more importantly, and why I feel safer in calling it a mess because personal experience on crashes and hard/software conflicts doesn't prove anything, I have found - while playing and testing quests for the NMA guide - that there are many ways to break quests, AI and pathfinding without even trying, and that the game has numerous collision detection problems. None of that is hardware related, it's just there.

And, I say again, it crashes for people on the Xbox 360 and PS3. Whenever something crashes on my PC first thing I do is go to troubleshooting assuming that I'm doing something wrong - it's just the natural conclusion. But c'mon, man...crashing on consoles? That's almost like an achievement in and of itself.

rune_74 said:

I won't get into the other parts because in some ways you are right and some ways wrong, just because alot of people liked a mod doesn't mean its better for everyone, since there is no perfect game.

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Obviously true. I'm just saying, the attitude towards Bethesda's games and modding can be a bit paradoxal. There's a reason modding was so popular for Oblivion and is again for Fallout 3, and it isn't the power in the toolset, because from what I understand the Oblivion modkit wasn't that good.

Brother None said:

Obviously true. I'm just saying, the attitude towards Bethesda's games and modding can be a bit paradoxal. There's a reason modding was so popular for Oblivion and is again for Fallout 3, and it isn't the power in the toolset, because from what I understand the Oblivion modkit wasn't that good.

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? The TESCS was great. Very powerful, and the live plugin system is a masterstroke.

Modding is popular for many non-broken games - just because I enjoy a mod that changes the game doesn't mean I didn't also enjoy the original game at least as much. But why restrict myself to one way of playing, when I can play through once one way and then continue having fun by playing it through again another way.

On topic of bugginess, Fallout 3 is very unstable on my machine. But then again it runs flawless on my gfs machine - if I was just looking at hers I'd actually say it's one of the most polished games I've seen. So in conclusion to me it seems just as buggy/perfect as most other RPGs these days, and if you take into account the scope and fun over many many hours it's provided it actually comes out very well compared to the huge collection of RPGs I own and play.

PS: It's still more stable than fallout 1 on my machine

Brother None said:

Simple fact; I've been talking to the head of Fallout 3 Nexus lately and he was completely taken by surprise by the mass of traffic to his site. He ran TES Nexus before, and to his great surprise F3N got the same traffic as TESN does from day 1: 50k visits a day. That's twice as much as NMA gets, and almost as much as GB does, it is, in fact, a pretty huge number for a recently launched site, and all they offer is mods - dark0ne having decided some time ago he doesn't feel like competing with the Vault or NMA on Fallout 3 info..

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I don't doubt that may indeed be a fact, but that does nothing to indicate that the majority don't like the game the way it is. 50k visits a day is impressive, but I'd tend to think that's because of the popularity of mods in general nowadays.

Brother None said:

It's a kind of having your cake and eating it situation. Why is there such massive interest in mods if the game is so perfect? .

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Probably because - 1.) No game is "perfect", and 2.) Mods are a hugely popular thing now for PC games, regardless if the game is good or bad. Just because there is an interest in modding a game doesn't mean it's because people don't like it the way it is. Many people have already finished FO3, and are now looking to mod it simply for variety. Another reason Bethesda's games are so popular to mod is because they made it so easy to do so.

Brother None said:

Also, Fallout 3 does in fact need a lot of "objective" fixing but that's not the modding community's job. We're talking about a game that is so unstable that it manages to crash on Xbox 360/PS3 and while it runs fine for some, it has a mass of problems for others. But hey, Bethesda is hard at work on DLC rather than having put its entire team on patching this buggy mess, because there's no money in patches I guess? As a consumer, that does annoy me..

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Fallout 3 is far from being a "buggy mess", I've been to the official forums quite often the past few weeks and I'm not seeing an abnormal amount of technical complaints for a game that has already exceeded 300 Million in sales. The PC version is rock solid for the vast majority who are playing it. I would tell those who are having such problems to turn their attention to their own equipment.

kalniel said:

Sounds like a repeat of c, unless you change the leveling system to mean that levels don't equal getting more powerful anymore, in which case everyone will moan that levels are pointless.

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Not really, it just gives a few alternative play paths. Means people can be level 20 at hitting people with swords and level 20 at shooting people with arrows or they can struggle through to the equivalent of about level 22 with hitting people with swords. Its the ultimate level of power in any one play style that unbalances things, being able to broaden the range of play styles available just makes it more enjoyable without being unbalanced.