The Blistering(?) Stupidity of Fallout III
 

In anticipation of it's sequel, here is an article about it's predecessor I picked up.
Guy gets carried away at times, but it reminds me of why I love Bethesda storytelling.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27085

In anticipation of it's sequel, where is an article about it's predecessor?

pibbur who knows he's either blind or nitpicking, but who doesn't know if this is correct English.

Ah, sorry, my man pibbur…here you go, just edited.

Ha. I never played F3 since it doesn't seem worth my time, but that's hilarious.

Read most of it and can't say I disagree. You simply need to shut your brain off for any Bethesda game and can then enjoy it… at least for a few hours before the sheer monotony kicks in.

The timeline gripe though… that's one of my pet peeves.

The vanilla game sucks, but FO3 is excellent with the right mods.

The writing and voice acting are pretty terrible, but it really is a great game if you like exploration. Like I said though.. it needs mods.

Console players disagree with you. :p

My fundamental stance on this has always been: if it needs mods to be a good/great game … then it is fundamentally NOT a good/great game. Period. Certainly not deserving of all of those GOTY / 5 star reviews, etc.

I thought FO3 *was* a good game - fun for what it was, and I agree with loads of what Shamus has to say about it. Didn't stop me having a blast working through it.

Hmmm … . should probably play it again before FO4 arrives … :)

I agree with your stance.

I thought Fallout 3 was great fun out of the box, but it had major balance issues - and the writing sucked.

But, to me, the game was about exploring a huge immersive world and it delivered in spades. It had a fantastic atmosphere and entertaining scavenging gameplay.

In terms of balance issues and mechanics, it's no different from any of the TES games - all the way back to Arena.

These games have always been huge and ridiculously imbalanced. You can break games like Morrowind completely with minimal effort - like exploiting the paralyse spell effect.

I don't know if people expected Fallout 3 to, somehow, break the formula and integrate tight mechanics - but I certainly didn't expect that.

It's true, however, that mods like FWE helped the experience a lot - even if it remains totally open to exploits.

As for the writing, that seems to be much harder to pin down. Some people seem to think Morrowind had great writing - where I don't.

The original Fallout had great writing for its time, so maybe if you expected similar quality with a modern take, there's reason to say it sucks.

I do think it's pretty harsh, though.

Absolutely - and I think the biggest thing is to always try to look at a game for what it *is*, not what the title says or what you want it to be … not that it is trivial to do so, we all carry bias and expectations and preconceived notions.

Indeed, and I was very fortunate in that I wasn't fanatical about Fallout in the first place. I respect and admire it, but it's not really a favorite of mine.

I always found the environment depressing. Strangely enough, Fallout 3 is perhaps the only post-apoc game I've played that I didn't find depressing.

Not sure why, but I think it has to do with the greater emphasis on the green sci-fi'ish color scheme.

Don't care for the wasteland much, but the vaults and various locations kept offering up great ambience and cool terminals to hack - with useful stuff to find.

Just my kind of thing :)

Eh the writing was definitely very uneven. I actually think the fact that it was fully voiced actually made the worst moments stand out more.

What's a little frustrating was that the best writing seemed to be done in the logs and notes detailing the histories of many of more interesting non-main-quest locations. Genuinely interesting stuff in many of them and very little of the screwball comedy. As far as the screwball comedy goes though, it seemed to have taken too heavy an inspiration from the wackier special encounters in Fallout 1 and some of the rather large goofy bits in Fallout 2.

I do think Bethesda may get to claim just how absolutely hate-able kids in FO3 were as fully their own thing.

Definitely. Bethesda is really good when it comes to miscellaneous things like the audio logs in FO3 or some of the notes and books in TES. It makes it all the more puzzling that the writing for most of their quests and character dialogue is so bad.

I remember a series of audio logs that were particularly interesting. I think there were 5 of them, and each one was from a different member of the same family. They were spread out across the Capital Wasteland in different locations, and they detailed the efforts of trying to survive and meet up with the other family members. Great stuff…

Ahh. So that's why I lik'em. :)

Pibbur wanna play. Good game. Pibbur wanna shoot things. Bang! You dead. Pibbur win!

I agree a lot of the audio logs were great in FO3. I've loved and adored audio logs ever since System Shock. Well, ever since Xenomorph did similar text-based logs ;)

It's much the same with Skyrim and the journals/notes you find.

It's indeed strange that they're so much more compelling than the main plot in that game.

Probably because our imagination plays a much bigger part :)

My biggest beef with it is definitely the 200 year thing, both in FO3 and FNV. We would not be sitting around twiddling our thumbs for that long. It really doesn't add up, and it annoys me more than it should. For whatever reason I just can't get past the 200 year thing whenever I see some location that I'm certain would have changed over so many years.

I agree with the 200 year perspective. Either it's bad design, or the future is indeed veeeery bleak. That fifties music doesn't help either.

pibbur who don't want an in reality first hand experience of this.

I wonder how many games truly stand up under close scrutiny like this, though.

None.

But when you leap into a particular universe you invite additional scrutiny based on that universe. Like Star Wars … I think that if 'Republic Commando' had not been Star Wars it would have been handled differently. Of course it wouldn't have sold as many copies either … the 'name brand' comes with ups and downs.

True enough.

I'm not going to argue Fallout 3 writing was great, but I think people are blowing things out of proportion here a little.

For instance, about the 200 years thing.

AFAIK, the world is supposed to be broken with a handful of people/tribes scattered across the wasteland.

Think about indian tribes and pre-colonization here. How much civilization did they feel it was necessary to build, really? For how many years?

I think it takes a certain amount of people in close proximity before you start fretting about infrastructure and great leaps in "human achievement".