Fallout 3 - Retro Review @ Press Start to Begin

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If your interested in reading a late review, and taking a poll for Fallout 3 then head on over to Press Start to Begin were they have both. Here is a small sample.

Fallout 3 came out in October 2008, roughly five and a half years ago. It won a large number of Game of the Year awards, deservedly so. It was one of the most revolutionary games of its time. It’s an open world FPS done right. If you haven’t had the chance to play this game, get it. Be sure to get the Game of the Year edition, it comes with all the DLCs.

Much like leifofrohan3891 in her review of Fallout 3, I didn’t play this game when it was new. I was starting to get back into gaming at that time, playing games like Ultimate Alliance 1 and 2 as well as Dead Rising. I played Fallout 3 for the first time less than a month ago, only recently beating it. And I can tell you, I was impressed. The game held up well, offering better gameplay and graphics than a lot of modern games.
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It's nice to read a retro review of FO3 that isn't deeply saturated with cynicism. But I'm surprised he didn't mention the mods for the game that can certainly enhance the experience.
 
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They were different games. I liked both. New Vegas was better, sure, but F3 also had it's good parts, for example the whole subway labyrinth was nice and led to better exploring, while in NV, you followed the one way south, east, north to get to New Vegas...
 
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I felt more hemmed in in FO3 than NV. Going through D.C. was pretty much one linear corridor of crumbled concrete and twisted rebar, with ambush points that became pretty obvious and predictable.
 
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Once I modded it to my liking, I found Fallout 3 to be one of the most immersive experiences I've ever had. A lot of great memories from that game...
 
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Doesn't really seem right to do a "retro" review of an RPG that's still one of the best games available in the genre. Has it really been so long? And yet, what's come out since then that made FO3 obsolete or outmoded? Still "best of breed", or damn close to it, right now. Going on six years later.

They were different games. I liked both. New Vegas was better, sure, but F3 also had it's good parts, for example the whole subway labyrinth was nice and led to better exploring, while in NV, you followed the one way south, east, north to get to New Vegas…

That's a great point, because the indoor areas are so much more fun that outdoor areas in these games, and FO3 had a whole lot more of them. Lots of other stuff Fallout 3 had that New Vegas didn't, mostly in regards to just being a better and more thoughtfully designed sandbox.
 
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Recently made the change back to FO3 from FNV…

While a superior RPG, FNV falls flat in practically every other arena.

However, it needs to be stated that, from a modder's perspective, FNV is immensely more scalable with better support for crafting, weapon mods, and scripting. Because of that, many of FO3's mods are very primitive compared to FNV's offerings - that and the fact that many of the best modders have long-since moved on from FO3.
 
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To endeavour to bring a conciliatory compromise to the two camps: If only Bethesda can put their open-world building skills to good use by fusing together the trump role-playing cards from Obsidian's New Vegas (i.e story-telling, choices, better writing etc) and build upon both games with the surely upcoming Fallout 4.

Somehow though, I think I may be hoping for too much, but again, we shall see. ;)
 
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I'm replaying FO3 GOTY modded right now, and unlike my countless tries with FO:NV - I'm compelled to keep playing.

Unfortunate, because I actually liked the writing in NV quite a bit, and I wanted to see how the plot evolved.

But the dreadfully stale environments, the super clunky state of the world (meshes misaligned everywhere and constant z-fighting), the crash bugs, the lack of the feeling of true freedom kept killing my interest.

I keep hearing about other people not experiencing these issues and I wish I lived in that particular universe, because I do love me some open world RPG'ing.
 
Pity that really DArt, as I do think (and it's difficult to argue to the contrary) that NV is superior from a pure role--playing perspective.
But I don't want to tread too much over old territory; we've heard everything before. I'm sure I could search the forums to find countless other threads where we've espoused our views on the two games. :)

I have the opposing experience; I find F3 so dreadfully shallow and lacking in consistent and coherent connection to the original games, that I can't bring myself to play it anymore. When I have, the writing and unfortunate liberties taken with canon ("Steel be with you!" etc) has driven me to want to practically murder everyone. :)

But as I say, fingers crossed Bethesda reflects and analyses deeply the strengths of both games and attempts to take the "best" from both of them.
 
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Yup, definitely not a new debate.

I will add, though, that I'm not emotionally invested in the Fallout lore or how the past games worked. I liked them at the time, but I never expected a sequel like them.

Ultimately, I'm more about immersion and exploration than the narrative - and I can't be immersed or enjoy the exploration if the basics are broken.

That's the gist of my issue with NV.

But, yeah, most of the FO3 writing is pretty terrible.
 
Late review but it's always nice to see one about a game that was good.
FO3 in my case was good. And just - good.

I hated the amount of the big nothing populated by endless respawns who are there just to be killed and serve no other purpose but to put us in Brievik's mindset.
Another thing I hated was crashing every 15 minutes or so, a thing that never happened to me in other recent Beth games or in F:NV.

On a positive side, it was more fun than Oblivion and I couldn't believe ppl were calling it Oblivion with guns - FO3 was much better game. But better than F:NV? It was not.

Since I've never played it's DLC, and bought GOTY edition a year or two ago, can't remember, when it was on sale… I'm gonna replay it soon.
UNMODDED. Hopefully GOTY version won't crash on me frequently as the original release did.
 
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The big problem with FO3 vs Vegas is that FO3 isn't optimized for 64-bit systems. There have been some mods and patches to address this, but it isn't as stable on Win7 as it is on XP. Some folks play it fine on Win7 but some have issues. I had to mess with my settings on my most recent play of FO3 to get it to work well.

P.S. I vastly prefer FO3 to Vegas, outside of the engine.
 
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The big problem with FO3 vs Vegas is that FO3 isn't optimized for 64-bit systems. There have been some mods and patches to address this, but it isn't as stable on Win7 as it is on XP. Some folks play it fine on Win7 but some have issues. I had to mess with my settings on my most recent play of FO3 to get it to work well.

P.S. I vastly prefer FO3 to Vegas, outside of the engine.

I know I'm not a crpgnut-level expert - but they're using the same engine and suffer similar issues, including the 32-bit memory addressing issue, as well as several multi-threading problems. The big difference is that Howard and his team seem to care about polish a lot more than Obsidian - though it could be a matter of competence and resources as well.
 
Same engine, but Obsidian did go in and totally revamp the executable to take advantage of Win7 features. Bethesda didn't retroactively rewrite FO3 to take advantage of the new architecture. Still, the game plays okay after some tweaking and I still love it. As an American, there is just something profoundly creepy about a destroyed DC.

Sadly, our government is so pathetic that most Americans wouldn't mind if DC got wiped out, as it would give us an excuse to just start over. Maybe we'd do it better from scratch. Nah, probably not.
 
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Same engine, but Obsidian did go in and totally revamp the executable to take advantage of Win7 features. Bethesda didn't retroactively rewrite FO3 to take advantage of the new architecture. Still, the game plays okay after some tweaking and I still love it. As an American, there is just something profoundly creepy about a destroyed DC.

Exactly what are you talking about? What did Obsidian do to "revamp" the executable? I'm curious, I have to say. Link, please.
 
Retro? Fallout 3? What?
Yes retro it has been six years and in development time the game is now ancient. Doesn't matter matter if millions are still playing it the game is now old.:p
 
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