Gaming Fallout 3 preview

Joe's enthusiasm is definitely inspiring, but I'm still dubious.
I don't normally like 'funny' games, I like things to be decidedly serious, but sometimes games can be funny and even break the 4th wall without ruining things for me. There are 2 games that really achieved this for me, Fallout 2 and Planescape Torment.
Without the humour of Fallout 2, I think much of the 'Fallout feeling' will be lost in Fallout 3.

Honestly, this preview pretty much confirms what I've suspected all along about F3, that it'll be a good game in its own right, but just 'not enough', much the same as BioShock was to System Shock 2 for me - a disappointing spinoff.

Hardcore fans of an original series tend to expect far, far too much from sequels (or 'spiritual successors' for those who've lost the rights to their own games) and I'm as guilty of this as any series-fanboy, but I think it's fair enough for me to state that Fallout 3 will simply not be in the same league as Fallout 1 or 2, and strays far enough from the originals to be considered another spinoff, rather than a true sequel (as F2 was to F1).

I don't think it'll be a bad game, I have faith that it'll be a great game and not another Brotherhood of Steel-alike, and I'll likely even buy it on release, but I suspect I'll have to constantly remind myself to not expect Fallout 2 in a 3D engine.. and that's disappointing.
The fact that I'll still buy the game on release just goes to show the deficit in absolutely classic games these days - If there were other games of this sort out there for me to partake in I'd probably spend my money on something else and 'passively boycott' Fallout 3 in a sort of mild protest, but it's all we've got right now, and all we're likely to get in this niche for a while more..

I just hope Bethesda had enough of their voice-acting budget left-over after hiring Mr. Neeson to hire more than just 3 or 4 NPC-actors per gender this time.. the repetitive voicing in Oblivion grates on my nerves to a point of immersion-killing frustration.

 

I'm starting to look forward to it now. It sounds to me like it is going to be made the way it should be.

 

I think the point Joe is making is that enemies are always your enemy in FO3, you can still be a *******, so it's not quite as bad as it first sounds.

 

I'd really like to believe in this, but I'm just not sold yet.

 

goose? I think good ole joe will be let down, RPG's suck more and more as we get older. I still have an origional isea for a game if someone wants to work on it together.

 

Woops

 

*drooling*

 

I am sure it'll be a hit! But i am not so sure it'll be a hit among the FO fanboys like myself. That pictures of that ghoul and that supermutant was such a turn off for me... That still loos like a Oblivion mod "judging by the looks" of the pictures.

It looks like the game was transformed in a tech demo on "how to convert a turn-based into a fps". The originals was never meant to be action type games. I know u may say "but it can be used as a turn-based", but it's clear that the main focus was to make it an FPS like RPG.

Shame on ppl that are doing the game based on FO 1 and never played the original... Even if the guy plays it throught now (and enjoy it) it's not like if u played when it first came. Much better, i agree, but not equal...

I really hope that my early thoughts about the game are wrong but let us give Joe Martin some credit. He's clearly a FO fanboy as many of us!

 

I stopped playing bedesha RPG's since their star wars games (what's it called). Character development didn't make any difference in difficulty, it didn't matter how you balance combat and other skills since the enemies would always "auto-dificult" to mach you. The whole character designing felt pointless... Now they sort of promise to change this but I'm not holding my breath...

 

I doubt that's how it's going to play, it's not how Oblivion or Morrowind played at least, I found the majority of my time playing those games was exploring, talking, investigating, and the combat definitely wasn't like call of duty or anything.

At first I was disappointed it wouldn't be like the originals with it's turn based play and isometric view, but after thinking about it and remembering how much I loved Morrowind, I think it will work even better than the original.

 

From a sequel you would expect just as good if not better, from fallout 3 I don't even see just as good coming from it. Since the same people who screwed up on what Oblivion could have been I dont see just as good happening. They will just focus on the one part that they will keep going on about, 3D and a ton of endings and fall flat on everything else.

I expect the same voice out of almost all the NPCs too, talk to a beggar and in one breath they cough and ask for money and the next they sound like just an other citizen clear throated and everything. That along with only 2 voices per gender.

Who here expects that the "oblivion with GUNZ!!!1!1!!11" prediction is going to pan out.

 

My goodness, this is starting to look like the bethesda forums. With all this negativity it's no wonder WW3 is upon us and we will all die a horrible death or turn into shiny slimy mutants. Talking things down is the easiest thing there is. Yes it's good fun to reminisce about the good old days and all the wonderful adventures we had in the original ones. Just don't judge this game before you've played it and if you don't like it, by all means, feel free to play the originals in all their pixelated glory.

 

have done that 20+ times getting a bit old....

 

Cool. My dad's Qui-Gon Jin.

 

While I lament the loss of the isometric turn-based gameplay that made the strategy in Fallout so much fun, I fear that this new Fallout is going to completely miss the spirit of its predecessors.

The dark humor of the series has always been its trademark and the cynicism of the characters and the setting is supposed to play off against the colorful and cheerfully optimistic 1950s themes and images.

And it seems that the Bethesda team has mischaracterized the role of the ghouls and mutants in the game. These were the poor saps that were most affected by the radiation and were either abandoned or couldn't make it to a vault. The mutants were slow and dim-witted and pitiful, not necessarily unthinking, psychotic killing machines. The idea was that the player could have the choice to show mercy and save them, or ruthlessly slaughter them. And in fact in Fallout 2 the player wins the game by stopping the release of a virus which would have destroyed all mutant life (perhaps a nod towards mass genocide).

The main idea, though, with the characters is that with the destruction of organized society, the player has the choice of either helping to rebuild civilization or try to live fast and make a buck. My hope is that these themes are still preserved in Fallout 3. But if the game designers seem to miss the idea that the mutants are victims of circumstance which the player can choose to help or to take advantage of, then I'm not sure how much else of the game will turn out right.

 

I hope the fact it's going to be released on consoles won't harm the ergonomcs (oblivion on PC was awful : you saw it was made for console. (1D menus, only vertical scrolling, no horizontal.)
We'll just have to wait and see the finished game to judge it. I honestly WANT to play it.!

 

O hai!

A bunch of us on Bethesda's Fallout 3 forums have some questions about this article:

1) What exactly did the author mean when he wrote that all the Super Mutants are "dead" and that Pete said they were "creatures"? Are Fallout 3's mutants some kind of zombies? Are they unable to have any dialog with the player?

2)Why is it that everyone keeps calling VATS "turn-based mode"?

Todd Howard - the game's executive producer - has stated that VATS isn't turn-based at all. In fact, he went so far as to describe it as a "glorified aimed-shot mode". Did Pete Hines or someone else say that it was turn-based?

 

Oh boy oh boy, this game is looking better and better every time i read a review or something, i personally like better the atmosfere of the first one than the lets-make-random-references-to-pop-culture kind of humor of the second one, i loved it too but i prefer the first one, and it's good to know that they choose that one as a reference. Only one question, is that ghoul in the picture Harold?

 

Since this offering is from Bethesda does that mean that once released, the game will require several patches just to be playable and then once the developers have made a nice profit it will be up to the modding fan base to actually repair the game to the point that it actually runs as originally intended? I guess I'll do what I did with Oblivion; wait 2 years before buying the game, install all the fixes and add-ons, then have a decent RPG experience.

 

FO 3 IMO is not fallout its lacking so much, and turn based mode is more slow time, beth has injected to much of its own themes in it to be a real FO game to much is missing from it, whats left is a apocalyptic FO themed FP action game that might have the best RPG/FPS hybrid system yet.

I am not expecting much for the industry to make a new project base solidly on its fiction and not ass rape to try and re market it to zombies(casuals) or tweens(12-2X),sadly the industry focuses so much we get luke warm crap like bioshock sure its above average but tis unfinished and they wont even patch it again because they are to busy working on new slop, the mentalities of the industry that make lite of the consumer's and product's will forever do more damage to them than piracy ever well, hell they are getting so bad they are trying to damage the 2nd hand market, I can't wait till consoles have accounts for each game or install tokens(lock a game to 2 or 3 units/IDs).