Oh, just found that the leader of the Outcasts takes them as well.
My money is on time and budget constraints, which is quite different from “lazy”.
I agree that game mechanics make up a good deal of the problem. Can you be a drug dealer? Can you be a slave trader? Can you organize and lead the Raiders? Protection racket? There are so many theoretical ways to be evil, but the default of many video games (and more than a few players of both video and PnP games) is that evil = indiscriminate murder. As stated in my previous post, most of the issue in video gaming comes down to time and budget constraints (because I’m certainly do not think the developers so dim-witted that they couldn’t consider this).
Slave trader? Yes. It pays well too ;). You can sell drugs to traders but it’s not considered as bad for your karma. I havn’t yet found a raider that isn’t aggressive, so I’ve had to kill them rather than lead them. Protection racket? Don’t know, don’t think so. I’m hoping to find more ways to be evil, but the list of possibilities seems rather short at the moment.
Oh, there are perks that allow you to act as law enforcement which gives good karma when you sell a piece of an evil person, or contract killer, which gives money and bad karma for killing somebody good. However, then we are back in the killing business, just limited to killing people with one alignment. I just remembered that you can engage in cannibalism which I’m quite sure is considered evil by the game.
I’ve encountered some “give me caps so nothing bad happens” dialog choices but I don’t know what they do. Haven’t used them.
If you want to go the morally ambiguous route, you could take both perks and off anyone you want for caps.
Particularly if somebody sees you.
I’ve read that eating a corpse by way of the cannibal perk gives you bad karma. However, my evil character has eaten the “Human Flesh” item without taking a karma hit (and he’s not all that evil yet).
How did you do this? Or is it something available on PC and not console?
This is actually one of the things I find sad in this sequel. The original fallout was great, but after getting input from fans they made fallout 2 really evil- if you wanted to play that way.
Getting the ‘childkiller’ fame and making porn films (before you are famous you only have the opportunity to be a fluffer), being a slaver, frequenting, pimping for, being a prostitute- shoot, the text on the back of the case stated you could get married and pimp your spouse- and you could be a slaver as well. As I recall, about the only thing they didn’t offer you was rape. I can’t remember about drug dealer, but that you can do- just sell the jet and buffout you find in f3.
Anyone else miss that stuff?
Well after hearing about it now I do, I never played the first 2 Fallouts. 
People say that FO3 isn’t Oblivion, but it really is Oblivion with guns and a different storyline. And a worse inventory system.
Not that it’s not a great game, I’m spending WAY too much time on it.
While that stuff is neat, it’s sort of like X-Com - that is, it’s all text, man. You can totally overwhelmingly load a game up with content when you’re just writing text for a sprite figure to stand around next to, but to actually bring things into this decade of gaming, some sacrifices have to be made - that is, fewer options, but options which are executed with much greater flair. I’m sure it’s great to read about how you just pimped someone, but it simply doesn’t hold a candle to actually watching Megaton go up in an enormous mushroom cloud.
I cannot argue with you there-
But I do think it is kinda wimpy that you cannot kill anyone young in fallout 3- the other characters will act as if you were assaulting someone and go after you, but they just walk away.
However, I usually skip through the voice acting as I read muuuuuch faster than they talk, and I don’t care that much about it.
I liked the idea of the rumors back in 2000 that fallout 3 was going to be done with the Myth engine. I would have preferred that by far to the fps version, as that would have retained the godlike function of the 2d version.
Books are just text too, you know.
Don’t get me wrong - if all the dialogue were there, and the only difference was whether it was voiced or not, then sure, brlng on the voice. But if it’s apparent that content was sacrificed for flair, I’d come down on the side of text every time. Trading that for lousy voice acting isn’t worth it.
Well, I’m glad I didn’t skip GNR – just getting inside was fun. Thanks for the tips, all.
Just in case anyone’s curious, I couldn’t get anything out of Nova, so I sauntered over to Moriarty’s computer when no one was looking. Unfortunately, I’m not scientific enough to hack his password. I ended up picking his locked cabinet hoping for a clue, and I was happy to find his password in there.
I’m still curious where Moriarty himself has wandered off to. Kind of sad that he’s not a likable enough guy that the villagers aren’t mounting a search and rescue operation for him. But that’s just the nature of the wasteland, I suppose.
Its not “wimpy” when it would mean removing the game from most markets. Fallout 3 was already banned in australia because of the drug use, child killing would take it off the shelves of pretty much every single major store. Rules for videogames have changed a lot since the last fallout game, they simply can not do what they did before even if they wanted to deal with a Mature only rating.
NPCs that lean on railings sometimes tend to fall off and die. It happens to moriarty and the guy from the water treatment plant. Also npcs in dangerous areas like Dr Lezco or the guy you bring sugar bombs too die very often if you leave their doors open. Its quite frustrating.
Though oddly realistic.
Well, not the door thing. You’d figure that anyone who could make ‘ultrajet’ could also figure out how to close a door ;).
But it sorta makes sense that in such a violent place an occasional contact might get wasted.
I’m playing a second time as Evil w/ Melee, and finding it way easier than Good. Playing Good, I had some trouble with caps and repairs. Playing Evil, I haven’t bothered selling anything yet, and I have all that I need. I used to approach scavengers and trade off as much as I had to to buy all their caps. Now everything in the world belongs to me. I get their caps and their inventory.
I got caught pickpocketing the preacher in Megaton, and run out of town in a hail of bullets. Will they hold a grudge forever? Should I wait until I can fight back to return? Other people have caught me and not cared so much. Is it all cuz of the Sheriff? Can he be quietly removed while leaving the town useful? Mainly I just want to preserve the almost bottomless stimpack source at the Doc.
Yeah. I’m not sure why exactly they can’t do mods even on the X-Box which stores datafiles on a hard drive, but all that furious modding activity going on is only going to be usable by the PC users.
Technically, a lot of the mods for PC would probably work on a console, but Microsoft will never open it up enough to let users to add/alter game files.
Beyond that, they actually encapsulate the hardware of the newer 360’s with resin to prevent any sort of modifications (which has just led to a glut of youtube videos on removing said resin) whatsoever.
More worrying however should be Bethesda’s handwavey mumble-mumbleing about the CK. This leads me to believe they’re forstalling or eliminating entirely its release, as they’d much rather have us pay for their officially confirmed DLC/expansion packs.
Too bad since Oblivion had some really incredible mods (which almost made it playable.)
According to the Strategy Guide, if you wait three days of game time the locals will forget what you look like and you can return safely.