Was just watching the latest demo of the game and reading some of the (heated) comments on IGN and thought I’d ask here what some of our 'dopers think…and if anyone is looking forward to the release of the game in (according to IGN’s countdown thingy) 63 days, 13 hours, 30 minutes…
First off, the game is going to be played mainly in first person. Looks like most of the heat revolves around this…with some additional thrown in because I guess Bethesda ‘SUCKS!’ and Oblivion was the worst game evah! Also, I guess this is a huge betrayal of the games roots and Bethesda is the anti-Christ, blah blah blah.
From my perspective, while I liked the old 3D isometric perspective I don’t have a real issue with a FPS perspective. I guess the game has a system (called VATS) that allows you to pause the real time portion of the game to target your opponents which should take most of the twitchyness out of real time game play. While I never really got into Oblivion, I did play it for a couple of days and enjoyed the game (I simply didn’t have the time to play through the whole thing).
While I may not ever get through THIS game either, I’m a fan of the Fallout series and will definitely be picking up a copy when it ships. How about the rest of you? Thoughts?
I enjoyed the first chapter of the series, and the second chapter was a lot of fun too, though I don’t think I ever finished it.
I must say that by far what I remember about the game most of all was the atmosphere, the interesting NPC’s and story, and the crazy awesome battle system. The isometric view had shit all to do with my fondness of the games.
Bethesda, from what I have been able to see in the demos, have done a great job of capturing the atmosphere of Fallout. The NPC’s and story, I think they can do a good job with, based on their previous RPG efforts.
The combat system is definitely different as it’s not turn based. However, the way they seem to have handled it (with limited pause and target gameplay) gives us the best of both worlds. A pause based targetting system, and a more twitchy traditional first person shooter experience.
I can see how turn based fanatics can be upset about the change, specially since so many old games that were traditionally turn based have gone real time or pseudo turn based. I really don’t think the game will suffer from lack of turn based combat though.
Yes and no. It may be a fun game, but it does fundamentally change the combat from strategy to action. Yes, there are action points, but it becomes a lot less a “thining man’s game”. Which as the draw once.
Thus far I figure there’s no way I can plausibly run the game on anything and therefore it is irrelevant to me.
This is my first foray into the series and I’m looking forward to it. Of course, work these days puts a serious crimp in anything extacurricular I want to do, though.
Yeah, work and hardware may be the limiting factors for me as well. However, this is the big game I’m looking forward to this year (since Empire Total War has been pushed back to next year), so hopefully my old hardware will run it ok.
I will probably miss the turn based combat though to…though the VATS system looks pretty good from what I’ve seen. I guess I don’t understand why they didn’t go with the real time to turned base system option they had in Fallout Tactics where you could run everything in real time or pause the game (or have it initiate turned based on combat)…seems like it would have worked fine. I don’t think it’s going to be the game killer some of the more over the top types were lamenting about on IGN’s board though.
Sounds like an awful lot of fanboys getting their panties in a bunch over something minor (Oh no! Batman’s suit doesn’t have the yellow logo on the chest! I’m walking out!!). Or, in other words, this guy.
I never played the other Fallout games. I can’t see how someone would be angry over this game though, it looks amazing (this coming from someone who doesn’t usually play first person games and adores turn based strategy games). Oblivion had some critical problems, but it would be hard to argue that it wasn’t a well-made game and a valuable gaming experience. How could you not want to play in the Fallout universe as done by the people who made Oblivion?
If I can actually avoid buying it on release date, I’ll be terribly surprised. Hell, I’ll likely be at the store at 10 in the morning just so it’ll be installed by the time evening rolls around. I’m planning to upgrade my computer in time, and I figure I’ll have the money in about a month.
Honestly? Because playing Fallout as done by Bethesda is never going to be half as good as playing Fallout as done by Black Isle. Which doesn’t mean the game is going to be bad: if they can make it as well as they made Oblivion, it will be a very competent RPG. But Fallout and Fallout 2 were brilliant RPGs, and Bethesda has never made a brilliant game. In fact, it wasn’t until relatively recently that they were able to clear the “competent” bar. Particularly, they’ve never shown the ability to create the innovative and multifaceted NPCs and plots that were the hallmark of Black Isle Studios, without which the new Fallout game might as well be any generic post-apocalyptic video game.
Which doesn’t change the fact that I’ve already pre-ordered my copy of Fallout 3.
Myself, I’m going to try and squeak by with just a RAM upgrade (from 2 GB to 4 GB) and perhaps a secondary video card (I have the older Nvidia 7800 series card in there atm). I’ll probably buy a copy as soon as it ships as well, though it will depend if I’m in town at the time. I’m pretty sure it won’t play on my current laptop no matter what I do, so that will mean I won’t be able to play it much (unless I can talk the wife into letting me buy a gaming laptop for travel :)).
Was he being serious there? I thought it was a spoof of some kind, as he seemed to lose it several times and almost started laughing while trying to appear to be ranting up a storm.
Something about the new Final Fantasy game not being culturally consistent with supposed Japanese gaming tastes…or whatever. I don’t play the FF games so I assumed he had some kind of point about the game not being up to whatever standards he was ranting about.
His accent seemed fake though and like I said several times he appeared to be on the verge of cracking up…though he could always be a nut case of course.
I bought Fallout and Fallout 2 on release date. I have no desire to play Fallout 3. I saw that same video demo and what I took from it was they removed tactical combat and have created some pretty weak environments. Since Bethesda has yet to make an RPG that I found to be worthwhile that helped influence my decision too.
And to the people on this board who insisted to me that the first promo trailer was exactly how the game was going to look: .
The previews (especially the videos) are telling us very little about how the actual Fallout experience will be executed. What made Fallout I & II was the non-combat gameplay, and what we’ve been shown has mostly revolved around pretty explosions and such. Will there be viable non-combat paths through the game? I believe you could beat Fallout I without killing a single person, if you really wanted to. Will you be able to do things like joining a mafia gang and then betraying them to their rivals by switching their oxygen tank with a poison-filled one? Will the world be full of post-apocalyptic 50s snark?
I think one major problem of the new ultra-graphics 3-D gaming world is that for a sandbox game like Fallout, you have to visually represent all the little actions you can do, and the effort involved is so much greater than for a simpler graphics engine (such as those used by earlier Fallouts). They even resolved a ton of actions with lines of text in earlier games, but that really doesn’t fly nowadays (welcome to the time of painfully rendered cutscenes). The result is that our options become prettier, but much more limited.
All this is pretty much a moot point for me, though, since my comp can’t even run games released in 2004. but if this turns out to be a masterpiece, it would be something to look forward to 3-4 years down the road.
I have to admit, at first I really objected to the switch from turn based isometric to first person real hybrid real time. I don’t think it’s a minor change, at all. It’s all about a play style. I tremendously enjoy the pace and strategic depth of being able to plan things out. I’ve always preferred turn based strategy titles to even the best RTS games. So it’s not a minor or an inconsequential change.
That being said, I may pick the game up when it comes out. I am, without a doubt, excited about it. But just as certainly, I’m going to read reviews on gamerankings before I even think about actually plunking down the cash for it.
And Miller might very well be right. What made Fallout and Fallout 2 so awesome was, primarily, the storyline/ambiance/dialog/vibe. I think that Bethesda can create a very solid RPG that’ll be a lot of fun to play. I’m not sure that’ll be enough in a Fallout title.
I may have to pick it up and pretend it’s just called Apocalyptic Romping instead.
I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, I’ll say that they shouldn’t change a thing, give me Van Buren, etc.
But on the other hand, change can be good. It’s just that there have been so many attempts to draw Fallout away from it’s turn-based roots with little success. All of those BS versions that came out after Fallout 2 were horrible. Why? They lacked story and atmosphere.
Fallout was a good game because it got a lot of separate things right. The combat system was cool because it required a lot of thinking. It permeates the whole level system. Advanced players would plan out several things. “I’d like to have 12 AP so I can take two aimed shots a turn” for example. Or maybe three aimed Gauss pistol shots? That would affect your entire character completely. Will the new system be so deep and rewarding? The character development system is deeply involved in combat, so if they make character development less pivotal then it will be bad.
Secondly the atmosphere. I think that Fallout shines in this area too. The retro-futurism is really interesing, in my opinion. Luckily this seems to have been done really well in the newest game.
Finally the playing path. The original Fallouts were completely open. I’m not saying that you could choose A or B, but I mean it was truely open, in an almost sandbox way. You could literally shoot your way out of (almost) any situation if needed. There might be one case where this isn’t possible. But there are myriad other ways to deal with it. Also, remember how open everything is? It is a huge map, and the only thing preventing you from going in the difficult areas is groups of creatures. I certainly hope they keep this aspect.
But in terms of absolute quality, remember that Deus Ex was a very good RPG that was also a FPS. It is certainly possible, but the point is that the character development has to be very rich to allow replay value. That’s RPG. The choices you make have to have a profound effect on the gameplay experience. In the previous Fallouts this would be hard to envision without the turn-based combat. But if they implement it correctly in the new combat system, then I think it will be good.
I’m going to buy it. I bought an X-Box 360 for that very reason.
I do remember reading a while ago that the man who wrote the Dark Brotherhood quest line for Oblivion was the lead writer for the entire Fallout 3 storyline. Since the DB quest line was the best one in the entire game, I’m really looking forward to that.
I don’t know…from my reading of Fallout 3 it looks like much of what folks are complaining about (the sandbox aspects, the tactics and strategy of character building, the various other RPG elements, etc) are all in there. The only thing that seems different is the combat system…and while I myself loved the old turned based part it seems with VATS you still get to make tactical decisions in suspended time (I’ve seen the demos where they go into VATS and target, say, a supermutants head or leg or arm or whatever). While it doesn’t seem to automatically go into turned based combat, it still seems fairly similar to me (I’m unsure how they use action points but I distinctly remember someone saying that they ARE still using them somehow).
As for the maker, I have played a few Bethesda games and they seemed pretty good to me. While I think there are several other RPG game makers out there of higher quality it’s not like their games totally sucked. Regardless, from what I’ve read it SEEMS like a pretty good translation to the game world, and what NPC interaction trees I’ve seen so far seem to indicate some level of depth to the story line aside from simply shooting up everything in sight.
I guess we’ll see…reading Gamespy’s assessment at E3 it looks pretty good to me so far…one of the big titles I’m looking forward to this year in fact (next year seems to be the year most of the games I’m really after will come out…Dawn of War II, Empire Total War…drool!)
.