Fallout 3 Megaton..er.. MEGATHREAD

[Reise]

Incoming Gigantic Fallout-Related Review Post...

At first I didn't really like Fallout 1 and 2 either, I just couldn't get into them. About a week ago I gave both a second chance though, and I've already been through the first one and am well into the second one now.

They play very differently than the newer games (obviously) so you almost have to throw out your ideas of what a Fallout game is if 3 was your first. They share the same backstabbing brutal apocalyptic wasteland feel, but in 1 and 2 that theme is just more amplified and you're shown countless times that the wasteland is a mean place to be in.

The difficulty curve in the start of both games is pretty steep too. You're pretty much everybody's favorite moving target until you get your hands on some money and weasel your way into acquiring a kickass weapon or armor. Now that I think about it, both games make you hate your enemies so much that once you get power armor and a gauss rifle you find yourself laughing like a madman as you blast those petty raiders who you had so much trouble with before into a red mist.

One thing the first two games did wrong is how the skills are used. Not in their literal use but how useful they actually are. In Fallout 1 and 2 only a handful of skills (like Small Guns, Lockpick, and Speech) are absolutely beneficial to have over all others. Playing a themed character that specializes in other skills (like an egghead Science and Energy Weapons user) pretty much gimps you throughout the entire game as there are exactly ZERO opportunities to use these skills until the later parts of the game. In the newer Fallout games you can make any character you wish and there are ways to get by and often succeed with certain skill choices.

Anyway those are my thoughts on the older games if anyone cares.

 

[Grobut]

I probably only had FO3 crash on me 4 or so times during my entire play time.

Same with me, only crashed 2-3 times.

It's also very fickle about what hardware/software combinations it'll run well on, i had tons of crashes and glitches, others have had much smoother experiances with the game

Please to be reading Comrades, for glorious progressive literacy!

Take a quick gander at the Official Fo3 boards, or any Fo3 community HUB, and you will find hundreds of people reporting constant and random crashes, and just as many saying "i don't get thouse at all".

There is clearly some gremlin there, and it seems to hit people at random across all OS'es and hardware, a lot of modders have attempted to fix thease issues all kinds of ways, with very mixed results from one user to the next, but nobody can pinpoint to underlying problem, some fixes work for some users, but make them worse for others.

 

[Dcode]

The difficulty curve in the start of both games is pretty steep too. You're pretty much everybody's favorite moving target until you get your hands on some money and weasel your way into acquiring a kickass weapon or armor. Now that I think about it, both games make you hate your enemies so much that once you get power armor and a gauss rifle you find yourself laughing like a madman as you blast those petty raiders who you had so much trouble with before into a red mist.

One thing the first two games did wrong is how the skills are used. Not in their literal use but how useful they actually are. In Fallout 1 and 2 only a handful of skills (like Small Guns, Lockpick, and Speech) are absolutely beneficial to have over all others. Playing a themed character that specializes in other skills (like an egghead Science and Energy Weapons user) pretty much gimps you throughout the entire game as there are exactly ZERO opportunities to use these skills until the later parts of the game. In the newer Fallout games you can make any character you wish and there are ways to get by and often succeed with certain skill choices.

Anyway those are my thoughts on the older games if anyone cares.

Agreed.

It is easy to screw up your character early on and then pay the price at a later stage in the game.

I also found it necessary to keep many different save files because it is so easy to break the game. For example; I accidentally injured a faction member without knowing, later in the game I went back to the base and everyone attacked me rendering the quest tied to said faction impossible to finish.

Its a brutal game but equally rewarding as long as you can keep up the motivation to play it.

 

[Flogger23m]

Please to be reading Comrades, for glorious progressive literacy!

I read your post but I felt compelled to let the potential buyer know that the game was rather stable for me. I understand that many others have issues with the game but it is always good to assure people that it does work on some PCs very well.

 

[[-project.rattus-]]

One thing the first two games did wrong is how the skills are used. Not in their literal use but how useful they actually are. In Fallout 1 and 2 only a handful of skills (like Small Guns, Lockpick, and Speech) are absolutely beneficial to have over all others. Playing a themed character that specializes in other skills (like an egghead Science and Energy Weapons user) pretty much gimps you throughout the entire game as there are exactly ZERO opportunities to use these skills until the later parts of the game. In the newer Fallout games you can make any character you wish and there are ways to get by and often succeed with certain skill choices.

Strange, I felt it to be quite the opposite. As FO3 is much more combat oriented, I felt it limited "sensible" character builds to combat focused ones, while the originals allowed for much greater variety of valuable and playable characters.

 

[Reise]

I suppose in Fallout 1 it would be better to specialize in some of the utility skills, and in that regard it does offer some flexibility. In Fallout 2 though, there are companions that can do a lot of that work for you, and the opportunities for specialized characters seem sparse so far in my playing.

I think the biggest difference is that you can actually ruin the game for yourself if you choose the "wrong" tag skills, as opposed to Fallout 3 or New Vegas where you really can't go (completely) wrong. Of all the things Bethesda changed about the series I think that's one of the best.