Hyper-accurate and aware enemies.
Enemies are very AI limited, simply running at you until death.
Realism-dispelling toughness of enemies–gruesomely hitting that bandit in slow-motion 6 times in the face with my handgun only makes him angry.
Limited variety of baddies. You have Monster A, buffed Monster A, and tinted-color-palette super-buffed Monster A.
Very limited armor variety, I would have liked to be able to customize the coolness of my look without sacrificing ability as much.
The experience dolled out for some guys is messed up. A crackshot master Supermutant with a tri-laser will mess you up but good cause your V.A.T.S headshots don’t work for shit, he’s almost bullet proof and despite his size hes Barry Sanders agile when it comes to avoiding your missiles yet hes worth exactly the same amount of XP as those talon Company chumps I continue to scrape off my shoe.
The constant Pip Boy micromanagement got old 10 minutes into my first game, what’s a brother gotta do for some assigned hotkeys?
And that’s where the PC shines for Bethesda games - you can use the toolset to create armour with whatever stats and look you want (within the existing game options, or using new models if you download/create them). There are some existing mods out there that do just that, although I haven’t tried any myself to comment on their quality.
My gripes were also mainly aesthetic. I got really tired of looking at brown, gray, brown, gray, brown, tan, brown, gray, brown, gray, brown, brown, and gray. I realize the game took place in a wasteland, but I still wish they had done SOMETHING to break up the monotony of the colors. They were so drab that the game became a big eyesore even though the actual gameplay was fun.
Also the power-suits looked pretty lame to me. I thought the Master Stalkers from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looked cooler and they had a jerry-rigged, haphazard look to them which fit the aesthetic better (the ones in Fallout looked like there was some big factory cranking out shiny, new identical high-tech suits of armor.)
I had the same criticism of Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil 5, Metal Gear Solid 4, and a lot of other games…why are game designers addicted to the brown/tan/gray color palette?
What bugs me the most about this game is the counter-intuitive counter-productive menu navigation.
if I’m in the pip-boy my instinct to get out is to press the escape key. no that brings up the main menu.
My instinct to get out of the loot screen is to press escape (also) or ‘tab’ (which is what gets you out of the pip-boy). No. I have to press ‘e’.
And it irritates me how OFTEN there’s at least one item you definitely don’t want. So you can rarely just press ‘A’ to dismiss it quickly. You have to click on the items you do want, then press ‘e’ or click over to the button to get out.
I’d have preferred this…
Press enter to search.
first item is highlighted. Press enter if you want it. If not press down. and press enter on the next item you want.
When you’re done press ‘esc’.
The escape key sould behave like this… If you’re in ANY menu screen it gets you out.
if you’re in NO menu screens it brings up the game menu (the save/load/exit screen)
In such a massively awesome game it seems no thought has been given to something called HCI (Human Computer Interaction, or the intuitivity with which a human controls a computer)
And it is even worse in Oblivion.
On top of all that the Pip-boy is an absolute sod to navigate around. To this day I still have to think about where something will be. I could be on the map. I want to change weapons. “Wheree’s the weapons?.. Oh they’re in ‘items’.” Click on Items “I still don’t see the weapons”… “Oh I’m in ‘AID’ click on weapons”
Yes, yes they are, at least the 100 track station. All period pieces, most of them with the same quirky/ironic feel to them. Great mod.
I’m also fond of the Existence 2.0 mod radio station - which is admitedly very different but it just works for me. It’s all ambient, moody and creepy as hell electronic “drone” music, with periodic interruptions by a depressive robot sharing his creepy dreams.
I hate collecting and being extra careful with ammo. Just give me ammo. The enemy has unlimited ammo. Sure, there’s a perk much later in the game to get more ammo but by then its too little too late. Its hard to play the marksman rifleman when youre worried about wasting your last 15 shots on a rabid dog.
Difficulty of some quests. The VR level was a dead end for me. I just followed what I found on the wiki. I dont see how I could have ever figured that one out.
Bugs. I think there were two quests I couldnt finish because they were bugged. Also, I got sick of the collision detection putting my bullets into objects a couple feet away. Someone needs to tell game designers that hitting a lamp post is actually very, very difficult in RL. Coding it so the lamp post has a surface area of a few feet wide is ridiculous. If anything developers should just be making these objects intangible and let us shoot through them, as the CD isnt getting it right.
Buy more. Since ammo is weightless, you can carry as much as you want. Just make it a habit to pick up every bit of good price-for-weight junk you happen onto whenever you explore, and trade it for ammo the next time you’re in a town. Even if you’ve already got tons of that ammo - you never know.
By VR do you mean the Tranquility Lane thing, or the Operation:Anchorage DLC ?
Yes, well, you have to remember these are the guys who made Daggerfall :D. For what it’s worth, the original two Fallout games also were riddled with bugs - more so than number 3, IMO.
That, however, I can relate to. Extremely annoying to waste half a clip in V.A.T.S because you’re shooting the telephone sitting on the desk you’re hiding behind, or some such idiocy.
As a matter of fact - you’re not. You take something like 1/10th the damage you otherwise would while VATS is active. Considering you can also do things like reload during the slow-mo, strategic use of VATS can actually make you substantially LESS vulnerable than you otherwise would be. You can even point-blank mininuke things in VATS and walk away from it, while the same shot in real-time would decorate the landscape with your bits.
Second the complaint about lack of interactivity. I had a suspicious feeling the moment I arrived in a place with interactive controls, that weren’t used for the immediate task at hand, that it would eventually wind up hosting the major climax of the game, or perhaps the ending, and had an idea of what would happen. The simplicity of the rest of the game world spoiled the plot for me.
My personal beef is that it winds up feeling too gamey. Sure, sure, it’s Fallout, but c’mon. You wind up with ten times the stats of anybody else, simply for being the Player Character. Fresh out of the vault, armed with a leather jacket and a baseball bat, and it’s -easy- to clear out a Talon Company base. These are the guys terrorizing the Wasteland? :dubious: The first and only enemy I wasn’t able to bludgeon into submission with a Power Fist was a deathclaw, and it wasn’t too much later that I was one-shotting those with their own claws. Kind of silly.
