Fallout 3 - Official Thread

[son_of_helvetica]

So it's a bug!

Fixed. One of many, sadly.

[Monkeyboy]

Can't I pretend it's a mystery, and not a software glitch? I want to solve it, storming the stronghold of some evil wastelander, and destroy his Ghoul Reaver Mind Control machine.

[Gorf King]

Is anyone slightly worried about Mothership Zeta breaking the game even further? The perks and the lack of rebalancing with regards to the skill points system (and the existing enemies as a result) in Broken Steel showed Bethesda don't really care about maintaining a stable RPG.

Yes. I know that many aren't bothered by this, but my desire to play through further content's been diminished quite a bit by the fact that by the end of Broken Steel there was nowhere for my character to head, at least in any meaningful sense: the choices just aren't there any more and the level 30 guy is essentially maxed out in everything with no specialisation whatsoever. That's led to the overpoweringly unbalanced (and unrewarding) enemies being introduced, imo.

It may not be important to everyone, but I do like at least the illusion of being able to customise and specialise a character in an RPG. The redundancy of this must be fairly significant to me, as this is the first time I haven't downloaded a Fallout 3 DLC as soon as it's become available. I'd actually rather they'd left the level cap where it was at 20 if it meant that players' characters all had different stats and therefore reflected the character development choices they'd made in the game. (Although I obviously would have preferred it if the level cap was raised but without homogenising characters into one fully maxed-out generic type whilst doing so.)

I think I'll hold out until the GOTY edition and see if they reintroduce some traditional RPG choices back into future DLC. Otherwise, I'll still love Fallout 3, but mainly for how it worked up until level 20. I'll play the new content eventually, of course, but I'm increasingly feeling that a big aspect of the game has been quietly brushed under the carpet by Bethesda and it's slowly mutating into a different game altogether, albeit within a similar set of environments and a few new enemies and weapons to keep it from feeling altogether stale.

[Concept]

You should download Point Lookout. I'm maxed out and didn't gain any experience points from it, but the exploration, the interior design and the quality of the quests more than make it worthwhile (I'd also disagree that the hicks are just reskins as some have been saying - they move a lot faster than typical raiders).

But yeah, if you stop thinking of Fallout 3 as an RPG and as an open ended adventure game with RPG-lite elements, the easier the flaws are to swallow. I can't imagine that Bethesda didn't see these balancing issues a mile off so I can only hazard that there's a problem (i.e. a huge amount of work that'd probably take people off ESV) in readjusting the experience points/skill system which may have numerous knock on effects elsewhere. I still hold out hope that they'll do something with the Game of the Year edition to address the fact that the more DLC that is being added to the game, the more it's watering down its core levelling components if they aren't being adjusted to accomodate the extra content. But then if Bethesda wanted you to feel as though you were truly specialising and for your choices to mean something come the end of level 30, why would they include a nine-for-everything stats perk?

Still, there is some good news. Bethesda announced that they have bought id Software. The optimist in me would like to think they'll eventually use id tech 5 and the focus can centre on design criticism (not that there isn't already enough). They're somewhat contradictory though - neither Fallout 3 or Oblivion handhold you too much in going out into the wild and exploring and that's refreshing when you see virtually every mainstream game these days doing their utmost to patronise the player, by giving you a dozen and a half tutorials for what they want you to do (before reminding you on the screen 300 times afterwards). At the same time it almost feels as though Bethesda are unsure or unconfident in the audience to give them an RPG where the choices are hard-edged enough that there isn't any going back on your decisions. It's as if they don't believe the majority of their players can accept anything which isn't a soft centre (take Point Lookout for example and the

oh, with a click of a sentence now you're free of your scar

.

[moosegrinder]

I forgot about the

ghoul mask

and came across yet another feral ghoul roamer last night so I popped everything I had; buff out, psycho, jet, the lot. I let freedom ring with 5 Combat Shotgun blasts and the fucker went down like a sack of spuds. None of this fannying about circle strafing with the rocket launcher this time, oh crikey no me old matey bob.

[Oracle]

with boxing training I havent had much time to play this, but I do love it so

[mr_woo]

Ack for fuck sake, I keep getting bloody lost in the Launch Base Platform section in Broken Steel. Trying to make my way to the Satellite Uplink part and the doors are either Hard or Very Hard to unlock. That's what I get for not levelling up my Science or Lockpicking. Though of course everything to do with guns and explosives is maxed out

[evilwallpaper]

I've only just started playing this, its really quite dark. I had to read the manual to find the 'flash light' so I could see what the hell I was looking at. Enjoying it so far tough, vats is neat.

Are there any perks or skills I should stay clear of that wouldn't be useful later on?

[NecroMorrius]

Not true. I got the lot of them without looking at a guide.

Needed a few hints from folk about the locations of the 5 behemoths, though.

I've found six in the last two nights, just by placing a marker in each corner, heading towards it and stopping off at every place along the way. I've only done two corners so far

[locke_211]

I think I'll hold out until the GOTY edition and see if they reintroduce some traditional RPG choices back into future DLC. Otherwise, I'll still love Fallout 3, but mainly for how it worked up until level 20. I'll play the new content eventually, of course, but I'm increasingly feeling that a big aspect of the game has been quietly brushed under the carpet by Bethesda and it's slowly mutating into a different game altogether, albeit within a similar set of environments and a few new enemies and weapons to keep it from feeling altogether stale.

How about starting a new character for PL and MZ?

Meanwhile I'm still hoping the PSN store will update today with bloody Operation Anchorage. What time does it normally update? I'm trying to be good and go and do some work, not check the store every two minutes for something no-one seems to even like anyway.

[JPickford]

Yes. I know that many aren't bothered by this, but my desire to play through further content's been diminished quite a bit by the fact that by the end of Broken Steel there was nowhere for my character to head, at least in any meaningful sense: the choices just aren't there any more and the level 30 guy is essentially maxed out in everything with no specialisation whatsoever. That's led to the overpoweringly unbalanced (and unrewarding) enemies being introduced, imo.

It may not be important to everyone, but I do like at least the illusion of being able to customise and specialise a character in an RPG. The redundancy of this must be fairly significant to me, as this is the first time I haven't downloaded a Fallout 3 DLC as soon as it's become available. I'd actually rather they'd left the level cap where it was at 20 if it meant that players' characters all had different stats and therefore reflected the character development choices they'd made in the game. (Although I obviously would have preferred it if the level cap was raised but without homogenising characters into one fully maxed-out generic type whilst doing so.)

I think I'll hold out until the GOTY edition and see if they reintroduce some traditional RPG choices back into future DLC. Otherwise, I'll still love Fallout 3, but mainly for how it worked up until level 20. I'll play the new content eventually, of course, but I'm increasingly feeling that a big aspect of the game has been quietly brushed under the carpet by Bethesda and it's slowly mutating into a different game altogether, albeit within a similar set of environments and a few new enemies and weapons to keep it from feeling altogether stale.

While it makes perfect sense that there should always be character development choices and trade-offs, part of me thinks that by the end of a 150 hour RPG I should have trancended all that and become an indestructible god.

[And]

While it makes perfect sense that there should always be character development choices and trade-offs, part of me thinks that by the end of a 150 hour RPG I should have trancended all that and become an indestructible god.

This.

I cowered like a girl in the school by megaton, or the super duper mart when I was a low level whelp, now I am a super bad ass killing machine, it's payback time. I've paid my dues.

[dr_manhattan^]

Playing through broken steel at the moment and what I really like about this dlc is the way it feels as if the world is evolving. It's the kind of add on a lot of people wanted in Oblivion with a Kavatch rebuilt dlc.

[donpeartree]

While it makes perfect sense that there should always be character development choices and trade-offs, part of me thinks that by the end of a 150 hour RPG I should have trancended all that and become an indestructible god.

Yeah I totally agree. I want to see a solid progression from leaving Vault 101 and cowering away from Raiders, clutching your precious BB Gun, to twatting Death Claws and Super Mutants in the face with some special Laser Gun of Death that you've found, rampaging around the ruins like you're King of the Wastes.

The game is no less fun for me now that I'm a badman. If it bothers you that much you can always increase the difficulty by a few notches.

[Concept]

Except it isn't 150 hours. The progression and leveling taper off at the 60-70 hour mark. It's not about how easy the game becomes so much as that it's not a very good RPG in the traditional sense of the word. You can let it off the hook by doing the Ocarina and Shenmue thing of being adventurous with the definition of what an RPG is, but at the end of it Bethesda go to great lengths to protect you from the consequences of your choices (perks to expand skill points for each level, hundreds of books to boost them) and there is little (if any) strategic depth to VATS. For a game that's so free to allow you to explore they're putting the player on rails so that everyone gets to more or less the same point.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

I've only just started playing this, its really quite dark. I had to read the manual to find the 'flash light' so I could see what the hell I was looking at. Enjoying it so far tough, vats is neat.

Are there any perks or skills I should stay clear of that wouldn't be useful later on?

Avoid perks that simply increase your skill and nothing else. Stuff like Daddy's Boy/Girl, Little Leaguer, that kind of thing. You'll get more than enough skill points through books/levelling to max out the skills you want and bring pretty much all of the rest up to a high standard (you can max out entirely with Broken Steel, without much trouble).

A couple levels of the Intense Training perk is useful, to get your stats up a bit.

[moosegrinder]

The +experience perk saw me right. Aside from that I picked what weapons I thought I'd be using most and grabbed those perks.

[b00dles]

The +experience perk saw me right. Aside from that I picked what weapons I thought I'd be using most and grabbed those perks.

I'm sure I mentioned this before in here but I think the balance of exp points against some of the guns is woefully off. Almost every gun in the game (or the most common at least) are small guns - I do find it a bit silly that a small gun counts as a Pistol, a Rifle, a Machine gun and a sniper and yet big guns only seems to include the launchers (rocket, nuke etc) and the flamers... I might be totally wrong but that's pretty much what the game has told me anyway, I'd have probably preferred it if it was 'one handed' and 'two handed' guns option - I pretty much didn't need to do big guns at all to finish the game and I think I finished with big guns on about 35 or so...

[Rudi von Starnberg]

Big Guns are the heavy weapons, essentially. Works for me. Anything that would be counted as 'small arms' is the rest of it.

Oh, also, I don't think the extra experience perk is worth it at all. It's not as bad as Here And Now (the level up immediately one) but it's still pretty superfluous - you'll level up quickly no matter what.

[And]

Good perks

Better criticals,

sniper,

commando,

Concentrated fire,

Take those 4 and you will be small guns king, especially if you go and get the

lincoln repeater rifle from the museum

, pretty much constant 95% chance of headshots hitting home.

silent running,

solar powered,

night person ,

[And]

Big Guns are the heavy weapons, essentially. Works for me. Anything that would be counted as 'small arms' is the rest of it.

Oh, also, I don't think the extra experience perk is worth it at all. It's not as bad as Here And Now (the level up immediately one) but it's still pretty superfluous - you'll level up quickly no matter what.

And the big guns seem to be better out of vats than in, or at least thats my experience, (except for the fat man, which needs vats to prevent self immolation)

[dr_lha]

PS3 DLC apparently not quite done yet (so may not make the late June schedule originally announced), they're putting on the "finishing touches". Good show I say, the last thing I want is DLC that's all fucked up like Bethesda have been doing on the other Fallout 3 platforms.

[Elliott]

Finesse is a fantastic perk. Same payout as +5 Luck in SPECIAL.

[JPickford]

PS3 DLC apparently not quite done yet (so may not make the late June schedule originally announced), they're putting on the "finishing touches". Good show I say, the last thing I want is DLC that's all fucked up like Bethesda have been doing on the other Fallout 3 platforms.

Hard to believe that the DLC invloves any machine specific coding. I would have thought it's all data & scripts.

[dr_lha]

Hard to believe that the DLC invloves any machine specific coding. I would have thought it's all data & scripts.

I think they are having to create a patch for the PS3 version of Fallout 3 so that it supports DLC, as the original game did not. Perhaps that's the issue.

[mr_woo]

Got past that part earlier I was whinging about. Was pure luck though, didn't realise that I needed to grab a high security clearance key off one of the officers running around. Pure random luck on my part

[b00dles]

Like I said though, I just thought it was unbalanced as you don't really need any of the big guns and if I'd have started out thinking 'ooo yeah, I'll be king of big guns' it would have been completely wasted use of exp as you don't really get any until quite a way in to the game....

I dunno, I just think that the split of guns to related exp skills and amount thereof was all a bit skewed, to begin with you either use melee or small guns, not a lot else.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

Yes, but then in the late game it's either big guns or energy weapons that give you the proper bang-for-buck. Melee and small guns become your day-to-day skills, then, with one of the other two being the heavy-hitters.

[Gorf King]

While it makes perfect sense that there should always be character development choices and trade-offs, part of me thinks that by the end of a 150 hour RPG I should have trancended all that and become an indestructible god.

Matter of personal preference I suppose, but without going into that again I have to say that Bethesda effectively cripple your omnipotence in any case, by introducing a raft of new hard-as-hell enemies (same skins as the old ones but with 500-1000% health and 200% damage, or something). So even if that's what you fancy - the God experience - you're buggered: what you have are easy-as-piss normal mobs and then, at random among them, some bastard who's inexplicably ten times harder to kill, and you're back to dying again. Or grinding them down.

So I don't think their solution's very good. It seems the worst of both worlds: I felt more indestructible at level 20 pre-Broken Steel, and I still had my 'unique' character.

[JPickford]

Yeah you're right. They seem to be very cack-handed with the whole balance thing. Hated the levelling enemies on Oblivion too.