Like I said, I think it might be that I just finished Mass Effect… that’s the one and only FPS-combat game I have ever enjoyed. I can’t put my finger on it; all I know is that comparatively, this feels clumsy. I think I don’t enjoy actual aiming and would prefer the computer do that for me, especially if my chance to hit is largely determined by skill and not crosshair position anyway. I’m tired of having to position the camera up and down every time something shorter than me attacks me, which is often.
I didn’t miss the hiding-- I meant in combat. Like a “take cover” option that lets you poke your head around the corner and see what’s there without putting your big dumb self out there to be shot. Again, something I really enjoyed about Mass Effect.
Whatever, it’s all a matter of opinion. I hated Oblivion for many of the same reasons; lots of people loved it. That’s all I got.
Well, for me it seems that your problem is playing on a console. The hand controllers are not really efficient for FPS usage. I would suggest you play it on the PC instead. I wouldn’t blame the game for problems caused by using an inferior input method.
The chance of hit is directly related to crosshair position, while the deviation is determined by skill (probably, I havn’t confirmed, though definitely in VATS mode).
Being able to peek around corners would be a welcome addition though, both for observation and to present a smaller target area.
[spoiler]Well, they did shoot an unarmed scientist in from of you, and your father would rather die than turn Project Purity over to them. The speech option might have been a skill related one (the president has a couple), so it’s possible you did miss it (I talked him into blowing up the whole facility using a logic loop, like old Captain Kirk, bwah ha ha!).
Plus, even if it did just kill ghouls and super mutants, that wouldn’t be all that good either; the ghouls in Underworld and the Megaton bartender are alright sorts and would be wiped out even with a virus like that. The purpose of the virus as it was was only the ‘pure’ humans with guaranteed Enclave allegiance would survive. [/spoiler]
I’m not sure this would make a difference for me. I actually prefer consoles for real-time combat; that’s why I got it for the 360 rather than the PC. I can’t stand keyboard/mouse for run-and-guns. Anyway, I’m sure the FPS aspect is fine, compared to other FPS games, but I really don’t like FPS. Somehow Mass Effect made it fun for me, so I guess I was hoping that I’d developed a taste for it, but alas, no. Perhaps what I should say is not “Fallout 3’s FPS sucks”, but rather a simple “FPS sucks”. It would be a whole lot more tolerable for me with an option to take cover, though.
Naturally. What I’m saying is, I wish there was an option to auto-target. I know some people wouldn’t enjoy that, but I know there are a lot of other gamers out there like me that would have preferred turn-based combat and really only bought this game because they enjoyed the first two, so I think it’d have been nice to have some sort of way to pause the game, select a target & command, and go back to real-time. It wouldn’t have been hard to implement, and I think it would’ve felt a lot more loyal to the original series, for people who care about that.
I don’t really understand what you mean by auto-target. Isn’t that exactly what VATS is? Of course, I havn’t seen how other games handle it, but I found VATS to be quite a nice way to handle it save for the excessive slow-motion. It pauses the game, lets you select a body part (or several, even on different enemies), then returns to real-time, exactly what you requested. I never played the original games, but from some forum reading I got the impression that VATS was an idea from previous games and worked much in the same way then.
That’s what crouching down (click left thumb stick) and the red ticks on your compass are for. Crouch behind a building/rock/whatever, sidestep right (or left, as the case may be), and use VATS to take a close look at whatever’s making that red tick.
And before I forget again, I must say that the team behind this game did a nice job with the Metro Station textures and I spotted a bus in DC’s ruins that bore a nice resemblance to a [url=http://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_165138-GMC-TDH-5307-A-1972.htmlGMC Fishbowl. 'Course, them being local helps.
Big Oblivion fan, although I’m an Oblivion fan that never got far through the main storyline. I like exploring and doing side quests as much as anything. I’m starting down the same path in Fallout3. I left the vault and headed off in a random seemingly interesting direction.
Glad to find out about the flashlight.
To the person that said the PIPBoy made them nauseous, it’s because it moves slightly, to simulate you looking at something attached to your arm.
Somebody told me today if the mouse seems laggy in the PC version, turn off Vsync. I’ll try that tonight.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing, and I don’t like it. I want an actual built-in “take cover” action that allows me to pop out, examine and/or shoot things, and pop back in in one fluid motion. This feature is fairly common in first-person games now, especially those with guns, which is why I miss it so sorely.
By auto-target I mean just that when there is an enemy in range, I’d like there to be an option to have the crosshair find the enemy automatically, in real-time or paused, instead of me having to fiddle with the camera while some two-foot-high cockroach is biting at my shins. VATS is a version of this, yes, but what VATS really is is a way of making called shots, with associated percentages which are all smaller than my percentage chance of just hitting the enemy period. I think that this kind of an auto-targeting function would feel truer to the original series (which had turn-based combat, and allowed you to simply select a target but required no “aiming”) than the true FPS combat in Fallout 3.
Very minor spoiler, but VERY important read on a really bad bug:
When you reach the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Steel (after the Jefferson Memorial quest), SAVE YOUR GAME. Usually the autosave feature takes care of you if you haven’t saved in a while, but in the HQ, one of the guys necessary to meet to continue the main quest can just dissapear and won’t respawn even if you exit and re-enter the area. Leaving and re-entering the area will cause your autosaved game to be worthless. After searching for him for 30 minutes, I found out about the bug and luckily had a save game about 5 minutes before entering which I loaded, and the second time around he was where he was supposed to be…)
