I noticed that the game has been out for at least six months, and the price is still $60.
What is its appeal? I’m interested in playing it, but I want to know more about it before I buy or even rent the game.
It’s a huge, open-ended game. After a very short introduction that’s mostly on rails, you can go pretty much anywhere you want to in the world. You can also make a genuine choice between being a good guy or a villain. There’s a lot of options for character customization. The world is very well realized, with a lot of cool little details. Combat is pretty fun, although it has its flaws. Good variety of weapons, though. The plot’s pretty well written, and has a lot of clever, dark touches.
It’s set in the post-apocalyptic world of the future as imagined by 1950’s sci-fi, with lots of dark humor and the ability to be evil. What else is needed?
I have to be the one dissenter in the group. I thought it was an okay and the 50ish humor is great, but I find the game play a little boring. I go back and play my heavily modded Oblivion over and over, but not so much Fallout.
Oh, it’s only the visually stunning and faithful sequel to one of the best games ever made. Nothing special, really 
If you shop around, and are willing to wait for a good deal, you can get it cheaper. I know after I bought it (full price, albeit with a $60 gift card that came for free with my 360) I saw another stores ad where it was selling for $45. Doh, if only I’d waited a week!
As for the appeal, it’s just got a great atmosphere, the retro 50’s vibe in a post nuclear wasteland, great old pre-rock music (Butcher Pete Part 1 got into my head so much, I tracked down the full song online), and lots of over the top blood and gory violence.
The VATS targeting system, mainly included by the developers to try and bridge the turn based combat system’s targeting system from FO1 and 2 into the more actiony real time shooting of this game, sets the game apart as well. Without it, the game would indeed come close to the “Oblivion with guns” some of the more rabid anti-fanboys labeled it as, or even an FPS with RPG elements. Instead, it’s its own creature, and one I enjoyed for many many hours.
I never played the prequels and went into this game as a newbie. To be honest I found it to be pretty buggy and boring in parts and well done in other parts. The 50s schtick wears thin half-way through and I absolutely hate games where you are forced to ration off ammo and go back to old save points because “Whoa, I should have saved the shotgun shells for the radioactive turtle and killed the womprat with the .22.” Ammo management is a sign of lazy design. I guess its “realism” but there’s nothing realistic about shooting something 10 times with a shotgun before it dies.
The VATS thing is neat, but the game suffers from horrible edge detection. I have often seen my shots fail to hit because the game thought a light post or something was in its way. That cost me one or two precious machine gun or rifle bullets often. Thats pretty inexcusable for a modern game. I havent seen this problem this bad since the mid 1990s.
I also dont like a lot of the moon-logic in the game and had a hard time getting some of the navigation going in my head. This led to many visits to the fallout 3 wiki. My other visits were had because at least two quests of mine were broken and I had to use some command-line trickery to fix them. In one case I had to revert to a game save from a few hours back. Lets just say the idea of an open world works better on paper than in programs.
That said the atmosphere is well done and the game actually gave me a nightmare. I didnt finish the game. By the time I got the power armor and was headed towards the end game I went back to the wiki and started doing a lot of the side quests I missed. I got tired of that and never loaded it again. YMMV.
Or you could, you know, go on and rent the game.
Ammo management isn’t really needed unless you don’t know where to buy ammo. It was a bit of a problem the first time (but it does force you to diversify in weapons) but that was largely because I didn’t seek out cities other than Megaton. Even then, as long as I made buying ammo a priority (I didn’t need to buy much else and I enjoyed searching ruins for items to sell) I didn’t really have any issue. Frankly, it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense for there to be stacks of ammo everywhere; it’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland, of course ammo is valuable – especially at first, when you don’t have a pot to piss in.
I never needed to go back to an old save point due to lack of ammo. In a worst case scenario, just fast-travel back to town; they have to have SOME kind of ammo there. You may not get to use the minigun 100% of the time at level 5, but that’s not exactly poor design.
Errr hello ? Post-apocalyptic world where everything is scarce ? Ammo management is a key point of the gameplay, and so is healing item management. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was the same, and frankly Fallout 3 is much, MUCH more lenient in that regards, since ammo and stimpacks are mostly weightless.
Not to mention that there are several options for people who can’t be arsed to look everywhere for one more mag : melee weapons are very powerful (even more so if you use V.A.T.S. with them), and the reverse vacuum cleaner can fire any object you pick up, ensuring you’ll never run out of ammo - and cheap laughs when you off a super mutant with a toilet plunger to the face :p.
You can punch people’s heads off.
/thread.
REVERSE VACUUM CLEANER?!?
Where the heck do I find that? I neeeeeeeed it.
It’s called the Rock-It Launcher. Moira at the shop in Megaton sells the schematics and the bits for it.
Taking the perk that lets you find more ammo in containers (Scrounger?) solves the ammo problem pretty painlessly.
I have, without a doubt, put more time into this game than any other single game, and most of it has just been exploration. I think that’s what’s most amazing about it–it really makes exploration fun. The stuff you discover, even if it’s as mundane as the morse-code stations, always tells its own story, or adds a little something extra to the larger atmosphere/story of the game.
Is it any good? I loved the game, but I never aquired a single custom weapon.
edit: Part of the appeal for me was looking forward to trying out perks.
“Well I’m going to pick this perk now, but that perk sounds interesting so I’ll pick that one next time I level up”
And shooting heads off.
Turning baddies into glowing ash.
Turning baddies into goo.
NOT, I repeat NOT talking to people. That was pure tedium.
I wouldn’t go quite that far, but the novelty did wear off fairly quickly. I eventually wound up turning off the voices and just reading the dialogue.
It’s ok, and they’ve done some fun things with the physics for the different objects you can shoot. It often takes a lot of shots to kill something though, accuracy is crap, and the ammo tends to weigh you down quite a bit.
There are other custom weapons that are better, like the dart gun, the shishkebab, the nuka grenades and bottlecap mines. The explosives have great damage and most other weapons have special perks, like the dart gun that always cripples both legs on an enemy.
That reminds me. There were times when it was necesary to repeat a conversation with someone (such as deciding you’d taken a bad route through the conversation. Or you just have to do it again for some reason)
I never turned the audio off. But I did know how to rapidly get through the conversation choices. So the audio would go something like this…
“wi” “vb” “th” “I’v” “an” “you” “it” “ye” “me” “ha” “th” “fo” (with a tiny pause between each bit of dialogue)
Yeah, but be careful, too much exploration can mess up your game sometimes. At least, it did mine :
I kept the main quest on the backburner to do sidequests first. I got to Three Dog, then decided to wait until a bunch of quests sent me there to visit Rivet City. Mistaaaake : I accidentally stumbled upon Vault… something ? The one where your daddy is being held prisonner by a rogue AI. The MQ instantly updated, skipping every quest between 3Dog and that one. I had, of course, no recent save to fall back to…
Aaargh, that was supposed to be a spoiler tag. Can a mod look into it ?