Fallout 3 for the PC

[Bahamut]

So how is the game? Is it worth a pick up?

[Schwaltzvald]

So how is the game? Is it worth a pick up?

I've been enjoying it so far, I'd say get it.

I'd recommend getting either the Xbox360 version or the PC version because of this quote; though I can't imagine what is this alleged content supposedly being made...

Todd Howard also confirmed that downloadable content would be prepared exclusively for Fallout 3 on the Xbox 360 and Windows; there is no downloadable content planned for the PlayStation 3 version of the game

Also I assume by now it's known that FO3 doesn't have multiplayer by the readers of this thread..?

I actually didn't know about it and despite learning about that just yesterday; it didn't ruin it for me. TF2 still does great wonders

[OverCoat]

This game is great, it's like Oblivion, Stalker, and Fist of the North Star all rolled up into one.

I can't wait for a Kenshiro mod

ATATATATATATA

[sgx]

I was interested in this game, but then I watched some videos online and the combat just looks super janky when you're not in VATS. Back when my bro got Oblivion, I was super excited then I saw the idiotic looking sword-swinging combat and it totally turned me off. Fallout3 seems to have a similar problem.

I also saw Dogmeat running around and he seemed retarded compared to the dog in Fable2 which I just spent 20 hours with.

[BardicKnowledge]

Combat isn't terrible -- I'm impressed that they've managed to make a useful body-part damage system when you're outside of VATS, and still keep the numbers behind the scenes based on your statistics instead of your FPS skill.

It's certainly not bad as long as you're not expecting it to be Call of Duty or anything.

[I-n-j-i-n]

Combat is at least way better than Oblivion's IMO. It's just a pain when you don't have any ammo or guns to fight enemies early on though. Way too brutal earlier on.

And the interface is lacking, but Bethesda games tends to have awful interfaces.

Finally, the character design and animation are pretty hideous for what is a AAA game release otherwise. They need to hire REAL animators and character designers, because the ones they have aren't cut out for the industry. It's like generic animation and generic designs. And worse than the norm by far. Basically the one big knock against the game. At least enemies heads and body parts fall out. That's always fun. The normal hustle and bustle? Not so much.

[The wingless]

I just won it (had it since Friday with a broken street date) and all I'll say is this:

the ending is atrocious.

Doubly atrocious when you consider how much better the over all narrative, plot structure, and campaign design is over Oblivion. Just when it starts picking up a FEVER pitch, it ends, quite unceremoniously.

I sincerely hope I just stumbled on an ending that just ended abruptly, and that there other endings perhaps have some more mileage and resolution. But I get the sneaking suspicion they won't

Oh well, either way, it's goty.

[Skummel Maske]

I don't really get the beef with the graphics. I think the game looks absolutely wonderful.

[I-n-j-i-n]

I don't really get the beef with the graphics. I think the game looks absolutely wonderful.

Not the graphics. The character design (when they're blurry and out of proportion, then it means they're ugly..) and animation (everyone moves like Frankenstein's monster..). Just about every major Japanese games get it right, so why can't a great Western company? Actually, BioShock had really horrible character design and wonky animation too, as great as the environ's graphics were.

Historically, it's the one thing Bethesda struggled throughout. Morrowind was amazing, but the visual style was atrocious on anything that is not a terrain/building. Oblivion had to be remade visually by the mod community because of the blurry-face-syndrome. They even tried to re-do the animation via mods.

Other than that, the green, machine font is a nice aesthetic touch, but it's problematic when some letters are obscured. Also, the font is a bit too small. Then again, Bethesda has a habit of making games a bit too verbose.

And wingless, I hope your hypothesis is true, because I thought I heard the ending was really good in Fallout 3...

[Vivi22]

Just about every major Japanese games get it right, so why can't a great Western company?

Well, there's always Valve. I'd put them pretty much at the top of the heap in terms of character design and animation. The facial animation they did in HL2 was impressive enough, but everything they did in TF2 is pure genius. Naughty Dog also did a great job in Uncharted if you ask me. Those are just two I can think of off the top of my head. Then again, we're talking about a company who's pretty much top in the industry and another so obsessed with getting the animation right that each character has literally thousands of subtly different animation sets.

I'd say a lot of companies have a long way to go to catch up to either of them though, western and Japanese a like. There are plenty of games that slap characters with one run animation, or don't animate things like opening a chest, etc. I see just as much bad animation on both sides of the Pacific.

[I-n-j-i-n]

I think there can be ugly animations, but for the design, Japanese designs just look more pleasing to the eyes. Maybe it's because they worship Hollywood talent and base many character off of them and also have a huge character design culture with the anime and manga talent making a lot of character designs for videogames. I think Western developers worry too much about the the spartan, utilitarian character designs that end up looking flat and uninspired for the most part. And in many cases, just flat out ugly.

Japanese character designs can be over-produced too, but I'd rather have something eye catching than the blobs we see often in western games. But I just think it's a bit worse in Bethesda than in something like BioWare. But even Mass Effect had pretty wonky animation (most of them in the battles), even though that game had great character designs.

[Schwaltzvald]

I fucking hate the fire ants...

Can't help but feel as if I wasted more bullets that I ought to have had I just stuck with the hunting rifle. Considering the position where I am, those particular bullets on me are very limited...

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2MdbDLnsi8&feature=related

[Eten]

fucking hate the fire ants...

Can't help but feel as if I wasted more bullets that I ought to have had I just stuck with the hunting rifle. Considering the position where I am, those particular bullets on me are very limited...

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

Wow, that video, of all the video's I've seen of Fallout 3, reminds me the most of the old Fallouts, and with an extra addition of awesome on top.(weapon balance with sniping being really awesome was pretty true of the old games too btw. Some creatures just took laser shots extremely well.)

Rated A++ 11/10, etc.

Fallout fanboy here is going nuts, I need to hurry and get this game now.

[lazygecko]

I don't really get the beef with the graphics. I think the game looks absolutely wonderful.

Bethesda seems to focus most of their efforts the technological aspect of graphics (save for Morrowind which had a pretty compelling environment). The character designs are often very bland. The animation quality went from downright awful in Morrowind to barely passable in Oblivion, and little has changed for Fallout 3. Third-person view is anything but enjoyable, and characters are still in that stiff pose when you talk to them.

Bethesda's games do a real good job of showing that there's much more to graphics than texture resolution and post-processing.

[Hy Bound]

It seems like their animation department is comprised of a couple of mentally handicapped children attempting to use MS Paint on a calculator.

All of the models are actually not terrible on several of the models, but the animation is horrendous. All-around. Terribly horrible. Even with the fact that there are a bunch of different types of inhabitants in the game; you'd think the canned animation of walking, for people at least, wouldn't be as bad as it is.

The worst part is that the environments are so compelling and interesting and they suck you in so well. Then, you see a guy lurching lifelessly up a hill towards you with the same shit animation as he would be running on flat ground. It completely takes you out of the experience. He might as well just float toward you with no animation.

[TehDonut]

I fucking hate the fire ants...

Can't help but feel as if I wasted more bullets that I ought to have had I just stuck with the hunting rifle. Considering the position where I am, those particular bullets on me are very limited...

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

My trick is to just stockpile all the frag grenades you have thus far for these dirty fire ants. if you lob one right underneath one, soldiers will die in 1-3 good nades.. oh, and don't forget those landmines. those things are sooooo fun when you're getting chased by muties and deathclaws.

also, you can change the difficulty of battle, just like in oblivion, but the experience you get also scales, which i thought was a pretty good feature.

[Schwaltzvald]

My trick is to just stockpile all the frag grenades you have thus far for these dirty fire ants. if you lob one right underneath one, soldiers will die in 1-3 good nades.. oh, and don't forget those landmines. those things are sooooo fun when you're getting chased by muties and deathclaws.

also, you can change the difficulty of battle, just like in oblivion, but the experience you get also scales, which i thought was a pretty good feature.

Actually a neat trick I picked up is that for one reason or another when I plop a land mine and say 3 soldier ants try to crowd through a bottle neck, sometimes one or all would go into a frenzy, thus flaming one another. With a sniper rifle scope I'd watch as each would attack one another constantly until one gets killed with fire. So long as I'm far away they seem to lose interest in me after their frenzy moment.

The same can happen with the grenades.

Nonetheless, there's just too many of them for now. Gonna hold off till I get a better rifle with ammo for it. Or at least better firepower.

[TehDonut]

Yeah you learn later that the fire ants frenzy if you cripple their antennae, then they just flame on each other.

Deathclaws on the other hand...hurt...a lot.

[OverCoat]

I was lucky enough to kill my first Deathclaw [a little trial and error though] and made the DEATHCLAW GAUNTLET. Best melee weapon ever. Sometimes I get raiders in like 1 hit, and then I also have this perk where VATS deaths are way more gorey, so these raiders basically turn to mush when I use the thing. Fucking awesome.

[I-n-j-i-n]

The sniping animation of the bullet flying in the air is so satisfying. The demos made it seem like it's an easy thing to do, but it's not. It's like one out of every 50 shots or something ridiculous like that. Also, it's weird to wield medieval swords to cleave people in half. So Oblivion-ish.

[The wingless]

Gentlemen and Ladies... you know how I hate to engorge my E*peen in this forum... having said that-

Demolitions at 100, with 3 levels of the Demolition perk will raise the Bottlecap Mine up to 802 points of damage(!!!). You can one-hit Super Mutant Masters which, with the exception of the Sentry Bots, are the most powerful enemy in the game.

[Archaon]

Looks like this game isn't working for a lot of people. Bethesda's forums are swamped with bug reports and complaints and desperate user suggestions for fixes.

I'm one of them, sadly. Everything's gravy until I get out of the vault, and then I can play for all of five to ten seconds at a time before the game crashes to the desktop.

Shame. What I've seen so far seems promising enough, if only because I've actually felt a bit of empathy for the characters thus far rather than the utter indifference I had for the SOULLESS HUSKS that made up Oblivion's NPCs.

EDIT: SON OF A BITCH I AM SUING BETHESDA.

They stole my fire ants idea. Every single facet of it. Giant ants mutated by post-nuclear radiation that could literally breathe fire by means of a special chemical sac contained within their bodies. I CAME UP WITH THAT YEARS BEFORE THIS GAME EVER CAME TO BE, YOU BASTARDS.

[OverCoat]

I have a strange bug where my mouse and keyboard stop responding but the game keeps going, so I'd still be walking, the music's going and everything, and then I run into a wall and get raped by Ghouls :V

I hope they address that in a patch. Restarting/reloading is a bitch. So far all I can do is quick save a lot.

I also replaced all of Inon Zur's shitty music. I have a lot of aphex twin music in the game directory now [Drukqs for the battles and Selected Ambient Works for everything else ].

I'm gonna work on releasing a full replacement pack of 100% free CC-licensed music that I believe would fit the game - anyone else interested? The music I selected creates an entirely different and better atmosphere.

[Effef]

I'm gonna work on releasing a full replacement pack of 100% free CC-licensed music that I believe would fit the game - anyone else interested? The music I selected creates an entirely different and better atmosphere.

I would be interested in this.

For the people being surprised that their systems can play this, I have a 2.1ghz Athlon X2 and a Radeon HD3850 and I easily get 50+fps and 100+ indoors at 1440x900 with ultra high settings. They really optimized this game well. You could probably get away with a nvidia 6600GT if you kept the resolution to 1024x768 or so. Its not really any more demanding than oblivion.

Haha I found it really funny the first time I installed it.

"Fallout 3 will now detect your video to set the settings accordingly"

.....

"Video settings set to Ultra High Quality"

....

Me:".... What?!"

I guess my computer is good enough lol, I mean I knew it was decent but didnt think it was that good. I took at look at the setting myself and every single setting was set to max, and it looks awesome .

Specs btw:

3.4 GHz Dual Core (Intel), 4 GB OCZ Platinum Ram, Radeon 4850 GFX Card.

Thats a little more than decent my man. You have a pretty strong computer, even if your friend did not tell you as much. He was right on the recommendation though, you might want to thank him for that.

[Skummel Maske]

I wonder if there'll be an option to use mp3s via the Pipboy-radio through some mod soon.