Fallout 3 - Reviews @ IGN, GameSpy, GameShark

After reading all of the reviews about how Oblivion was the greatest RPG ever made, I'll take all of these reviews with a huge grain of salt. I knew two years ago that this game would get A++ 10/10 reviews from most major sites, since they will bend over backwards to distance themselves from the game's less than enthusiastic fanbase. I want to see what the reader reviews say.

Interestingly, Gamespot's review isn't up yet. Is it because they refused to promise a minimum score in exchange for a pre-release copy? We shall see.
 
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im taking all outside reviews and opinions w/ a grain of salt.

When my RPGwatch homeys start rating it, that's when I'll sit up and pay real attention!
 
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I think these allegations of actual corruption are frankly pretty silly. The review business doesn't work like that.

Which doesn't mean that reviews are any good, especially if you're looking for something beyond "it doesn't crash, it looks and sounds good, and it gets the ol' adrenaline pumping."

I'm waiting to hear from some Watchers as well before springing for it.
 
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Friendly fire? Anyone who played FO 1/2 can tell you that was the bane of those games. I bet 90% of my reloads of FO 1 were because either my followers gunned me down or vice-versa. For FO2 I avoided the more dangerous weapons and still got hit a lot. Van it really be any worse in FO3? BTW, FO 1/2 purists should be applauding this if it is so.

Taking too many gunshots to down someone is the bane of games that use hitpoints and levels. The only way they could have avoided that was to scrap SPECIAL and that just wasn't going to happen.
 
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Another vote for wait and see. Like others have said...The reality of Oblivion after the glowing reviews has put me off paying much heed to anyone other than folks on these forums.
 
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Friendly fire? Anyone who played FO 1/2 can tell you that was the bane of those games. I bet 90% of my reloads of FO 1 were because either my followers gunned me down or vice-versa. For FO2 I avoided the more dangerous weapons and still got hit a lot. Van it really be any worse in FO3? BTW, FO 1/2 purists should be applauding this if it is so.

I was more thinking in terms of the Oblivion type of friendly fire, where NPCs actively ran in between the edge of your sword and the enemy (which also occasionally caused civil war among town guards as the AIs got into each others way as well). The review also mentions NPCs getting in the way rather than NPCs shooting at the player, which made me assume that we are dealing with a legacy of Oblivion rather than one of Fallout.
 
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Lots of things to do - too much FedEx.

I actually thought there was too little FedEx in Fallout 3. All the quests are of much greater scale, but there is only 25 or 30 of them. So when you come to any town you know that there is going to be two quests there(that's Megaton, Paradise Falls and Rivet City), smaller settlements have one.. There are so many locations like abandoned libraries, factories, vaults and dethclaw-infested cities that just exist there for you to pillage, loot and maybe find bobbleheads. Don't get me wrong, they actually managed to make exploring fun. But later in the game, when you've seen all the monster types and all basic kinds of locations, when yo've accumulated enough power so loot and exp don't mean a lot to you, it becomes kinda pointless. If I were Bethesda, I'd make some NPCs in villages ask you to kill that ant queen in the nearby factory or get some hi-tech component from the vault. Or just tell you some tales about the surrounding locations.

Apart from that, I really liked the game. Compared to other Bethesda gemes, it's not on par with hardcore Daggerfall greatness, but neither it is as crappy as Oblivion. I had about as much fun playing it as I had playing Morrowind(in case you think Morrowind was crap too, you have your point, but I liked it despite all its flaws).

In case anyone is interested, I could not wait for my collectors edition to arrive and pirated it almost 3 weeks ago. Played it every evening for 2 weeks (about 40-50 hrs of gameplay) and didn't get everything in the game, but had about enough for now and plan another walkthrough sometime.
 
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Sweden PCGamer gave it 81%. A very good reivew with the good and the bad. The reviewer did feel it was "cramped" world, and not as "big" and open world as Oblivion.

So far the reviews seems to say Buy buy buy for me. (But i still play Oblivion from time to time :) ). But also, the reviews of Far Cry 2 said Buy buy buy - and after that i only trust in metacritics user reviews.

Life is still good. Great. Now i have two more days to finish Dead Space. WOAH!
 
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...but we couldn't help smiling every time we saw (and by saw, we mean destroyed) a mechanical man that looked strikingly similar to Robbie the Robot from "Lost in Space."
Had to respond to this -- Robby the Robot was actually from the fifties film "Forbidden Planet." The one on TV's "Lost in Space" was similar but different and certainly wasn't named Robby.
 
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I personally don't enjoy the FPS perspective at all, so I was hoping they'd make a better 3rd person view in FO3 than Oblivion. This doesn't seem to be the case, however, so I'll wait and see (depending on what people here report).
 
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Had to respond to this -- Robby the Robot was actually from the fifties film "Forbidden Planet." The one on TV's "Lost in Space" was similar but different and certainly wasn't named Robby.

I believe it was simply known as the Robot and he never once said Danger, Will Robinson!

The geniuses on staff at Wikipedia say that it was a Model B-9, Class M-3 General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot, or GUNTER, which tells me it was German, and we all know what that means...
 
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Listen to all you bash Oblivion....seems like you have some rose colored glasses when it comes to rpg's. was it a perfect 10 out of 10?

No, but it was no where near the worst rpg of all time. The sad truth is many rpg players over exagerate things to the nth degree. Sad.

Fallout 3 looks like great fun, if because it does not fit your box of what an rpg is or is not then fine don't play it.
 
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In case anyone is interested, I could not wait for my collectors edition to arrive and pirated it almost 3 weeks ago. Played it every evening for 2 weeks (about 40-50 hrs of gameplay) and didn't get everything in the game, but had about enough for now and plan another walkthrough sometime.

Not trying to sound harsh, but we're really not interested in hearing someone brag about pirating a game so he\she could play it before the rest of us. You're really better off just keeping that type of thing to yourself.
 
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Crispy Gamer recommends it but finds some weaknesses:
The graphics look a lot better on the PC, which is nearly enough to recommend it above either of the console versions. But what seals the deal is that you can expect plenty of mods from Fallout fans, eager to tweak the game to their own exacting standards. The price you pay on the PC is the terrible interface that does almost nothing to take advantage of the keyboard. It's as if Bethesda expects that moving your hand off the WASD keys -- much less being able to escape out of a conversation -- will be too much of a strain. Hopefully, this can be patched or modded, since a few sensible hotkeys will go a long way.

Consolitis?! WTF???
 
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Not trying to sound harsh, but we're really not interested in hearing someone brag about pirating a game so he\she could play it before the rest of us. You're really better off just keeping that type of thing to yourself.
/Agreed

Its almost impossible to find pirate free forums nowadays. Even those forums that give bans for warez discussion boom in pirates during every game release. Rpgwatch is the least infected I know (its also the smallest) and I hope it will stay that way.

Crispy Gamer recommends it but finds some weaknesses:
Consolitis?! WTF???
Hopefully they ported the gamepad controls from consoles too. Since its games for windows trademarked there is a good chance for it.
 
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I think these allegations of actual corruption are frankly pretty silly. The review business doesn't work like that.

Google Jeff Gerstmann. Naieveity is a sin.
 
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Consolitis is getting to be more and more of a problem. No miracle, I guess, since PCs are getting further and further ahead while the console base keeps growing.

I'm still playing Far Cry 2 and having a blast with that. It's got a cripling console issue, too, though. With a 50 square km game world, keeping track of what patches of grass you've burned and what buildings you've blown up is just too much for it, so it forgets about them as soon as you get more than, oh, about a kilometer away. Blow up a guard station, drive away, come back 10 minutes later, and the whole thing is right back the way it was before. That's what it takes to keep your save game size under 2 meg, I guess.

Still mighty fun. I need to get through it, though, so I can play Fallout 3. And Dead Space. And Mirror's Edge. And maybe Borderlands. And the new Neverwinter stuff. (Eeesh, could somebody with a time machine PLEASE send any one of these games back to mid-July when there wasn't dink to play??)
 
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It looks like the oblivion case to me. Near the game release all the big gaming sites were giving it tens and nines. Almost none of them dared to mention the epic flaws such as scaled gameworld and hand holding. Later on when the game had finally shipped more objective reviews began to pop up all over the official forums.. Its one thing to have a different opinion but downright lying is simply disgusting.

The funniest thing after the release fuss was GameSpy's top ten essential mods for oblivion article. Basicly the editor who wrote it made it quite clear that oblivion is nearly unplayable without these usermade addons. So why on earth didn't they mention those same flaws in their review?

Anyhow my quess is that underneath f3 is likely a fun game, but like all benthesa games it will have many small annoying feautures. This time around it may the whole combat system. Firstly Vats sounds horribly boring to me and the alternative real time first person shooter combat looks pretty dull too. So hopefully the other gameplay elements prove themselves better, like exploring, questing etc.
 
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Google Jeff Gerstmann. Naieveity is a sin.

I know about Gerstmann. The reason he's so newsworthy is precisely because the advertising/editorial firewall is considered so important.
 
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