There are actually too many games out there right now that are worth playing…I simply don’t have the time to play them all. THIS one though I plan to make the time for.
Ugly? I have no idea where that comes from. Just from what I’ve seen on the podcasts the game looks visually great IMHO…and the podcasts never do full justice to a game in my experience. Well, I’ll know for myself on Friday, but from what I’ve read in this thread so far I think I won’t be disappointed.
The only downside I see atm is that the Sins mini-expansion comes out this week as well IIRC…and I really want to level my Dwarf Engineer in Warhammer. Plus there is al that RL stuff…
I spent about three hours on it last night. At my pace (generally fairly slow), that was enough to explore Megaton, disarm the bomb, and then wander around looking for a minefield and getting eaten by giant naked molerats.
I’ve never gotten into an RPG. I’ve been playing Mass Effect a little, and it’s sort of been interesting, but didn’t wow me.
This game sucked me in from the beginning. I think it’s fantastic, and not since Bioshock has a game created a world that I found this interesting.
As for the darkness, I found that increasing the brightness in the menu helped a lot, and didn’t make other things too bright. (I’m on a 360, by the way). The “people” graphics are only average, but the world itself is beautiful. I loved the design of Megaton.
I’ve never been someone who watched the clock so he could get home and play some more, but this is going to be a long afternoon.
Sounds like what my mom used to tell me when I wouldn’t eat my vegetables. :rolleyes:
You might call me disillusioned with all the empty promises overhyped games have made and fallen short on - remember Fable 1? Remember Bioshock, Spore, The Witching, or MGS:4? The industry’s greatest, headlining titles are (in my opinion, of course) generally more style than substance, but they con us the whole way into believing that it’s the greatest title since Portal.
On the other hand, I love post-apocalyptic scenarios, and I’m a sucker for instant gratification. I’ll buy it this afternoon, my roommate should get a kick out of it if nobody else (me) does. Looks like the hype machine gets me again!
Oh; and I can’t wait until Left 4 Dead comes out and Valve once more proves their utter, utmost superiority.
To all the people calling it “Oblivion with guns” - myself included - I think it’s important to make the distinction that we’re talking about the ENGINE and general vibe, period. Every element of Fallout 3 is significantly better than Oblivion, but ESPECIALLY the story, quests, and combat. The major failing of the big O for me is that the story is completely boring and unengaging and the component quests that make up the story are EVEN MORE boring and unengaging, leading to a totally awesome set of tools (character creation, items, world) with almost zero reason to actually play.
I’m about 8 hours in and just reached level 5, and am just totally in love with this game. My only complaint or issue now is that I’ve taken on like 6 quests and can’t figure out which one to do next, and two of them I’m really stalled on (finding the kid from Arefu and getting to the radio station) - I either can’t figure out what to do next or I keep running out of ammo and getting killed.
Seriously…have you considered simply giving up on gaming? It sounds like nothing appeals to you, or that you are after some illusive golden age of gaming that never happened. Could you list a game you considered good, if you feel that Bio-Shock was over hyped? I guess I can see that you didn’t like The WITCHER (though I thought it was pretty good), but Spore is pretty refreshing and quite innovative…as well as being pretty fun to play.
BTW, myself aside, most of the folk who have responded to this thread are actually playing the game…and giving their opinions freely. Where is the ‘hype machine’ in that?
Based on my existing play time, Fallout 3 is the first game for me to ever completely live up to the hype. That won’t be the case for everybody, but it was for me.
How do I put this? The “mainstream” gaming media rarely, if ever, fairly judges big-name titles. Or for that matter, lesser titles. Big titles are pushed because the belong to big advertisers, and get inflated scores. In one infamous instance, Gamespot blatantly fired a reviewer who mildly criticized “Kane and Lynch: Dead Men”. Mot other reviewers get around having to do such things by sticking with the well-worn, the cliche, and the shallow. They don’t really look deepo because then they might have to be honest.
Also, they stick with Previews. After all, you can have five million previews of a game, with numerous flashy screenshots carefully planned and tweaked by the art department to be incredibly awesome and which no one will ever, ever actually see in-game. But you can have only one actual review. And of course, the previews are always insanely positive. You can find the codewords and extremely carefully hedged warnings if you look very closely.
Neither MG4 nor Bioshock w3re, per se, bad. They may even be the best games of their respective years. This, however, says a lot about the state of the gaming industry and the lack of quality therein.
MG4’s gameplay is really good… when the actrually let you play. Which is not often, because Hideo Kojima apparently went off the deep end and is desperately trying to pretend his cockamamie plot makes sense, and effin insists you watch it unfold. Bioshock, well I like Bioshock, and it has some incredibly good moments, but the game as a whole is incredibly short, ships with obnoxious DRM, and has the most insipid “plot twist” I’ve seen since KoTOR.
Though the “mainstream media” as you call it may review mediocre games as good on a fairly frequency basis I have yet to find a game that was reviewed well across many sources and was a total stinker. Sure, everyones opinion of games are different, but rarely does the collective “mainstream media” label a game as AWESOME when it’s really mediocre or worse.
Bioshock and MGS:4 were labeled AWESOME by the “mainstream media” for a reason.
Usually the consensus reality among a bunch of sources, via Metacritic, is a fair representation of a game’s quality. Every once in a while, something will sneak through that gets unfairly bashed (“The Force Unleashed,” for example) - or worse, unfairly loved or given a pass - but for the most part, the uh - mainstream game media - gives an adequate picture.
There was something a few years ago that got high marks across the board and then was one of the worst games I had ever played, with glaring flaws that nobody mentioned in any of the reviews. I wish I could remember what it was, because I felt positively hoodwinked.
I don’t know about Sacred Gold, but I gave *Sacred *a 2/5 on Gamespy when it came out in 2004 (Metacritic reports it as a converted 60, but I would consider it a converted 40). So if that was the one, don’t blame me.
Somewhere between. I had it for maybe a week and a half or two weeks and I spent 30 hours on it within that time, much to the dismay of my friends who didn’t see much of me over that period, hehe. I wanted to play through sorta fast, but still experience a decent amount, as I have a stack of games i need to play and I KNOW I’ll be getting back to Fallout 3 for another play-through within the next couple months, after I beat Dead Space, Fable 2, Gears of War 2, Mirror’s Edge, and probably Prince of Persia somewhere in there, hehe (note: I don’t have all those games now, obviously). Too many damn games… Oh, I was level 20 or 21 when I finished, without taking any Here and Now perks (the one that gives you an instant level)
That’s basically right, though when you have on power armor or something you basically just have the suit and the helmet, you can’t wear goggles/glasses. Also, you know there’s a 3rd person view, right? I don’t know what the button is (on the 360 it’s the left bumper), and it’s not as good a perspective (on this engine) as first-person, but if you just wanna check yourself out you can do that any time
There is at least one house, probably more, that you can get depending on how you play out the story (won’t ruin anything here) and you can leave stuff there. You can also redecorate, buy things for it (like a jukebox, workbench, etc) and you ahve your own robot who can give you a hair cut, free purified water, or tell you some truly atrocious jokes
The items are somewhat comparable to Oblivion. You can pick up things like butter knives, plates, ruined old books, etc that have little value to them and are really just kinda there to get in your way when you’re trying to pick up the ammo or drugs or health items behind them. One important thing to note is that most health items that you find around (other than purified water and stim packs) have have a radiation stat to them (usually like around 6 rads or so) and you build up radiation by touching water and such as well (or being near irradiated barrels) and if you get enough radiation (for me it was over 200) you get a little sick, and start dying at over 600, though you can also get weird mutations that give you bonuses such as regrowing crippled limbs if you’re irradiated. There’s also your standard armors and guns and stuff that are everywhere and, once you get up to a decent level, are useless for anything other than selling
I’ve been hanging on to a lot of random items, like conductors and tubing and stuff, on the assumption that once I get some schematics I’ll be needing them to build cool stuff. Is this a correct assumption?
honestly I didn’t get too much into the building of things, but short answer is yes. Also, there’s a place you can turn technology like conductors and batteries in to get decent items. Most of the stuff in the game can be used, but it’s often better just to sell it. There’re so many conductors, tubing, motorcyle gas tanks, etc, lying around that if you want to build something it shouldn’t be that big of a problem finding the parts for it. Also some fo the traveling caravan merchants sell that stuff
Ok. I’ve put alot of time into the game now and am liking it much more. I’d say the only thing that REALLY sucks is the mapping system. It’s terrible and I can’t believe you can’t have a mini map or whatever on the screen.
Otherwise I really like the game. The graphics have grown on me some, though they still don’t blow me away.
I’m finding the VATS system almost makes combat TOO easy. Especially once you get your main weapon skill leveled up to around 50. I’m using small guns and I kill most ghouls in 1 shot and alot of super mutants in in one shot as well.
The open-worldness is hurting me a little bit. I went exploring and ended up on top of a hotel and ran into some folks that needed rescuing, though the way they were talking I should have gotten the story started elsewhere.
Yeah, that’s the one MAJOR problem with the game - the map is terrible, especially in a world where everything’s rubble and there are so few points of reference. There’s also no indicator of whether something is above or beneath you - the first time I went to Arefu, I couldn’t figure out where it was even though I was supposedly right on top of it, because it was on top of the overpass.
Turning up the difficulty will help, but there are much harder enemies out there. Super Mutant Brutes are pansy compared to the master, and I take it you haven’t seen a Behemoth or a NightCrawler/STalker whatever yet? Also, when you advance more in the story you fight some heavier hitters.
And yea, that quest was supposed to be started in Underworld (The Ghoul City in the Museum of History)
The map does suck, there’re a few tricks you can do to get around that, and the little blip on your compass blinks faster when you get nearer to the object it’s pointing you towards, but it does suck to have to constantly check your local area map (and that it doesn’t differentiate up from down at all). I wandered around Ratchet for like a freakin hour lookin for someone
