The comparisons I’ve seen make the consoles look pretty bad, but even then, stock graphics are only temporary on PC. Skyrim looks like this (for example, there are other graphical looks you could choose) or this. And youtube doesn’t even show the differences very well, because of the low frame rate, resolution, and bitrate, youtube looks way worse than what it actually appears like on PC, reducing the full effect of the comparison.
Anyway, does the game still use the retarded infinite-instant heal mechanic? I always hated in Bethesda games where you basically couldn’t die so long as you were carrying a bunch of potions/stimpacks/cabbages/whatever. “Oh, I’m in a fight with a death claw. Oh, I took a big hit. Time to eat 50 cans of food instantly. Oh good, I feel better. Oh, got hit again, time to eat 20 boxes of cereal” - it’s a ridiculous way to balance healing/survivability. I mean I mod that out, obviously, giving healing effects a cooldown and making them heal over time, but it’s so bizarre to me that the stock game behavior is so obviously silly.
I’m not sure if it’s 'cause I’m on the hardest difficulty, but so far, healing hasn’t been instantaneous. You can see how high our health will go after using a healing item, but it’s takes a bit for your HP to go up.
So I couldn’t do what you mentioned above when I met my first deathclaw. It hit me, took me down to a quarter hit points, I healed up to full and tried to run away, but when it caught me, my HP still hadn’t gone up enough yet, and he killed me.
The Steam controller is becoming my default controller for a lot of games. Unlike the previous fallouts, the 1st person shooting in this one feels like… well a first person shooter, and twin sticks just frustrated me. The UI leaves much to be desired when it comes ot mouse and keybaord though - it’s Skyrim all over again, so I actually don’t mind the rest of the gamepad controls, so switching to the Steam game pad I’m getting much better camera control, and I’ve got a few extra inputs which I’m going to probably set up to make building and crafting a bit easier.
Stephen Fry’s show QI made me aware of this forgotten bit of Americana, though I would be surprised if the people who made New Vegas had not heard of it, because the toy rockets with actual isotopes seems to be too close to a true story to be a coincidence:
I’ve played it for about two hours now, and barely got out of the starting area. So far it runs really well for me, and the atmosphere is great. I’m not quite sold on the new dialogue system, though.
I’m also trying to decide whether I want to backtrack and distribute my SPECIAL points differently. I know you can boost your stats when you level up, but the perfectionist in me wonders about things like whether maxing out one’s endurance early on gives better maximum health than starting low and building it up.
I was lukewarm on the idea of the new SPECIAL/perks system replacing the skills, but I’m finding it pretty intuitive so far.
I don’t know whether or not to look up bobblehead locations…on the one hand boosting all your SPECIALs early on will be a big advantage, on the other I’m extremely wary of spoilers - one of the bobbleheads in Fallout 3, energy weapons IIRC, was only obtainable during the penultimate main story quest.
Anyone know if they are just out in the open, or are the locations of one or more really spoilery? Already picked up the PER one, it’s in the room where you first meet Preston Garvey.
In Fallout 3, it was worth making the careful run to Rivet City to get the INT bobblehead early, because I hated missing out on 1 skill point per level. Here there doesn’t seem to be any such pressure, unless there are bobbleheads that will give you things you’ll turn out to have spent points already. I generally never boosted my skills over 90 unless I’d already gotten the bobblehead for them, because I hated to miss out the free 10 points, as little difference as it makes in the end.
Caveat to this: FO3 doesn’t play well with Windows 7 and up. It can be made to work, but it takes some doing. I was never able to get FO3 to work properly with Windows 8.1 (random freezes, crashes, and eventually wouldn’t even open at all), and NV ran, but it was a pain in the ass and still experienced pretty frequent performance issues.
Played a few more hours. It’s very immersive. Combat feels more dangerous than in previous Fallout games, but maybe that’s just on account of my still being a lowbie. There’s something oddly satisfying about wheeling around and capping a mole rat that’s just surfaced behind you; it’s weird when it happens ten times in a minute, though. Ghouls are pretty tricky to fend off. Sources of radiation seem much more common (IMO a good thing).
This was an issue with the Games for Windows service I believe. When they shut it down, you couldn’t even play the game anymore as the GFW executable was outdated and it wouldn’t autopatch.
But I believe they recently removed this from the steam version of the game, and now it runs fine on modern OS’s. Same with New Vegas.
The AI is MUCH improved from the previous titles, and so is encounter design. Before, all enemies did pretty much the same thing: stood around waiting for you, then bee-lined straight for your position, or if they had ranged weapons, would stay planted where they were and fired in your general direction (maybe moving forward a bit if you tried to run).
Now? Merlocks ambush me from behind when I try to poach their eggs, Mole rats come popping out of the ground around you, enemies take cover and move from cover to cover, either to maneuver closer to you, or to fall back if you’ve got a lot of firepower. They also split up and flank you! Had several “Clever girl” (Jurassic Park!) moments with all manner of beasties and raiders.
