Fallout 3 Comments by Christian Donlan

Oh, this doesn't sound good at all; It seems to include all the failings of the Elder Scrolls series when it comes to NPC interaction and then throw dodgy gun fighting and patchy graphics into the mix. These EG previews have pretty much killed any lingering expectation when it comes to this game...that said, I remember their reviews of Folklore and Resistance...

pip boy is annoying

Well, rough around the edges but involving and complex is better than slick and soulless, but the previews have got me a little worried. Still, Oblivion was kind of rough looking with terrible voice acting, and if it's anywhere near as addicting and enjoyable as that then i'll be content.

Well Oblivion had most of the flaws mentioned in this preview but it didn't stop it from being the best game I've ever played so I'm still looking forward to Fallout 3 forthe same reasons I enjoyed Bethesda's previous games, i.e. it's massive, immersive and thoroughly entertaining. That said, it does sound like Bethesda have stuck to the Oblivion template too closely rather than attempting to upgrade it to match other RPGs like the conversation trees in Mass Effect as EG mentioned. In that sense Fallout 3 sounds like it might be curiously dated - the non-reactive A.I. stands out especially here - but I don't think that will bother me particularly as I play these games for the story and to explore the open world. For me, there's nothing better than a game that let's you go and do anything... linearity sucks!

@Skillian - Is there such a word as 'addicting'... shouldn't that be 'addictive'?

This really doesn't sound promising at all... :(

Hmm well maybe the mod community will be able to "fix" it... like they did with a lot of things for Oblivion....

Eurogamer i thus far the only place to be quite so negatuve about this one.

I've read loads of positives.

Of course, it could be that all the other previews involved exclusives and pay-offs but it even got considered for E3 rewards didn't it?

Will this be a classic Eurogamer joker with high reviews from all but here?

We'll know soon enough I guess.

@Darren
Americans use "addicting" instead of "addictive". Just because the yanks do it, it doesn't make it right, though.

You guys really have something against this game don't you?

This is not a good preview.

"Other RPGs may be slicker in terms of presentation, but few companies have Bethesda's skill for spinning out such surprising and involving incidental stories..."

You have got to be kidding me.. That's just so wrong.

Why does Bethesda have to destroy fallout. Id rather never have had a sequel than have had this..

I remember reading endless hyping for Oblivion and it turned out to be very disappointing indeed, good to see EG taking an objective approach to Fallout.

I think I'm definitely going to give it a miss, don't want to ruin my memories of the original Fallout universe and if it has the same failings as Oblivion then it will just irritate me.

I'm interested to know if you guys at EG let the developers know what you're opinions are whilst you are previewing the game. I imagine the developers have been through many rounds of playtesting (you'd hope), so probably are aware of the game-breaking problems such as dodgy controls. But these issues still appear again and again in final products, so do you give them a hard time for the serious problems that you come across, or do you treat them gently, so as not to hurt their feelings/so you get invited back? Not that berating some poor chap for the state of a game will make any difference, but you as game journalists are the people that represent gamers' interests, and those that can get closest to the game makers.

Maybe not the place for such a question - im just interested by the inner workings of game industry/journalism politics. And want devs that let silly control-issues slide to have their arses kicked.

Sounds like a post-apocalyptic Oblivion to me.

Which isn't bad, but just not what I had hoped for.

Frankly this sounds really, really gay. It's being unfavourably compared to Mass Effect, a game that I thought was crap, so I'm not holding my breath about this being any good.

Once again, I'm happy that someone is voicing the concerns I feel about this game. Every other gaming website seems to be heaping unadulterated praise on it which seems very odd given the feeling I've gotten from watching gameplay videos.

and characters who would repeat the same handful of lines and were quick to forget the fact that we'd been shooting at them two minutes previously

It's stuff like this (and the bar scene) that make it sound bad. Have they never played Gothic?

Still think that an isometric perspective works much better for this kind of game. It's more abstract, and lets the mind fill the gaps. In the end, an NPC you see from above with a few lines of text floating over his head is more convincing than a dubiously animated, uncanny-valley character that repeats the same lines again and again with mediooce voice-acting.

With every game Betheseda ramp up the visuals but narrow the scope (Daggerfall > Morrowind > Oblivion). Please let this not be a continuation of the trend. I loved Morrowind and still play Fallout every few years, so if this becomes Post-Apocalyptic Oblivion Lite I'll not be happy.

Depth not visuals please. And no more horse armour cash-in packs. Stick it all in together and make it a game worth buying in the first place. Otherwise everyone will rent like they do with most single player games.

Apologies for using the word "addicting" - for me it has a slightly different connotation than "addictive", so I didn't think about it when posting, but you (both) are right :)

What was so great about the Mass Effect dialogue trees? They felt pretty much the same as many other games I've played. Can anyone explain?

I didn't like Oblivion and it looks like I'm not going to like this.

/scratches off wish list

The Mass Effect dialogue trees added nothing to the experience for me and often got in the way of fluid dialogue. A lot of the time I just wanted to sit back and listen.

Anyway, looking forward to the reviews of this

Looks like this is gonna be a backward's step for RPG's, Fable 2 it is then.

@ SirPhobos

You'd hope that Bethesda or indeed any developers worth their salt would read previews and hands on sections from journalists. However it often appears not, or that it's just too late to do anything about such highlighted problems without going back to the drawing board. I guess we will see...

Does the game still have the SPECIAL system as I haven't read much at all about the stats and skills side of the game?

My hopes for this game are diminishing with every preview/hands-on I read. Not one place is happy with it overall.

wow.... i already had my concerns but now it seems they have got far too much wrong. broken fighting mechanics, lame VATS system (which sounds like you'll have to use it after all, if you want to win (try shooting a grenade out the air without it)), bad AI that almost seems a step back from oblivion, the same horrible dialogue interface from oblivion with that awful straigh-on camera angle. that was probably the most damning preview i've read on EG.

"With no hint of radial selection or keyword attitude choices which seemed likely to become the RPG's version on Halo's rechargeable shield - a genre standard by virtue of near-unanimous theft - instead, a quick introductory conversation with the mayor of Megaton reveals that Fallout 3 is sticking with a system largely unchanged from the days of Monkey Island."

I'd say the contrary, reverting back to keywords in the ME-way is more like dumbing things down. Can you imagine playing Planescape: Torment that way? It takes away the whole meaning of a proper dialogue tree system. Sticking to dialogue trees and making it more cinematic is fine with me though.

@gooseman42: You have to kinda hope that it is just time that is the issue. It's not as if developers _want_ to make a shit game, or are so incompetent that they think it's good (well, some are, but others get a lot of things right while still making very broken games). I imagine that the turning circle of these monster-sized games is fairly huge - once they've invested a lot of time/effort/money into features that are intrinsically broken or aged (as seems to be the case with the dialogue-tree here) then it takes balls of steel by the project leader to change it in the face of corporate pressure. That doesnt excuse badly balanced/controlled games, however. Those are things that release dates (expecially ones a far off as Fallout3's) shouldn't force into games.

What the hell is this about the dialogue system? Mass Effect's equivalent wasn't in any real way different or special from the standard...

@systems - The ramp up in visual quality comes hand in hand with the more powerful hardware anyway - people expect that - but if you read EG's preview it doesn't sound to me like Bethesda have compromised the game for prettier visuals at all. In fact, EG imply that the visuals are functional rather than impressive.

This Morrowind/Oblivion comparison thing annoys me. Sure the latter wasn't perfect but it was a damn sight easier to get into and more coherent that the confusing former, a game I wanted to love but just couldn't get into due to the poor Journal, the reams and reams of (mostly) redundant text and the generally dire combat which had your moves effectively determined by the throw of an invisible dice, i.e. if it was a "low number" then even if you hit the enemy, it wouldn't register. Ditto for using shields; even if you blocked, if the number wasn't in your favour, the enemy hit you. This made the combat hit and miss literally and as such the game was hard even from the start. I found myself regularly killed by rats which made the game feel ridiculously unreal. At least this was something Oblivion got mostly right and considering how much fighting you do, I'd say that was important. Sure the "world levelling up with you" thing in Oblivion wasn't ideal but if you can level up through fighting then why can't other NPCs: I mean it's unrealistic to expect the rest of the world to remain unchanged while you become god-like, right?

I think people often look at Morrowind and remember it's large open world and freeform storyline but forget that the whole experience was not really that accessible to anyone but the most committed. If it had been structured like Oblivion then I've no doubt that I'd have been singing the praises of Morrowind too. Sadly, I'm not, I just remember it as being an impenetrable, flawed experience on both the PC and Xbox (I played both games).

And to get back on topic... I hope that Fallout 3 is more like Oblivion than Morrowind...

I'm slightly puzzled by Eurogamer's concerns about the game having regular loading times, a dialogue system that reveals your answers verbatim and friendly NPCs that don't react to gunshots. Bringing up such marginal aspects of the gameplay seems more like a determined effort to follow the massive trend of extreme Fallout 3 scepticism than anything else. And if Eurogamer are so enthusiastic about Mass Effect's "modern" dialogue system they might as well go back and play Access Software's adventure classic Pandora Directive, which famously featured the exact same system way back in 1996 (!).

Even though it is rather sad that so many people automatically assume that Fallout 3 simply cannot be good because it isn't developed by Black Isle, I must say I share many of the sceptics' concerns about a disappointing combat system, since that was clearly one of Oblivion's major shortcomings. On the other hand, another big problem with Oblivion was its uninspired script, horribly clichéd storyline and overall lack of originality in the game environments, and it is in Fallout 3's story that Eurogamer clearly sees the most promise. So, at the very least, Fallout 3 may still prove to be a more satisfying experience than the notoriously overhyped and underwhelming Oblivion and Morrowind.

Darren: I never liked Morrowind either (although I at least finished it once), but I fail to see why the combat system in Oblivion is any better just because it's even more action-oriented than in Morrowind. Why don't game developers understand that virtually all truly great RPGs between, say, 1986-2002 had turn-based (and thus entirely stats- and skill-based) combat systems or at the very least included a proper pause function (like Baldur's Gate)? Why must every RPG developer from Blizzard to Bioware try so hard to satisfy trigger-happy action fans? Anyway, that was off-topic, so please ignore my rantings...

Why must every RPG developer from Blizzard to Bioware try so hard to satisfy trigger-happy action fans?

Because, frankly, that's what sells, particularly to Western console audiences.

Ssshhh... Listen... That's the sound of thousands of gamers cancelling their pre-orders.

After Mass Effect arguably took RPGs forward, this sounds a bit crappy.

A hard one to call. Some big concerns floating about in my head, but talk of involving story progression makes me a little reassured.

On the subject of the dialogue system, I'm not quite sure the comparison with ME really stands. The radial selection mechanic is just a little UI widget. It it nowhere near being the core of the system, and I'm surprised Christian really gave any weight to it at all. Using a similar mechanic in FO3 would have made barely any difference I'm sure.

He also mentioned the lack of attitude based responses, but FO traditionally gave you additional conversation options based on having high stats in certain skills (low intelligence noticeably changed the way your character "talked"). Its hard to say what is better really. Tbh I found the ME system a little over-helpful at times, with its very clear blue and red colour coding. If I knew I wanted to play the anarchist, I would often just select the red option without really giving much mind to the words themselves. I remember wanting to increase my cerebral stats in FO1 and 2 specifically so I had a better chance of talking my way out of a situation in the future. So long as FO3 includes a similar system (and they may have done, 90 mins is not enough to develop your character and find out) I will be happy with that area of things.

On the subject of whether other sites had to say about FO3, and whether they were more positive than EG or not, I really don't give a f*ck. This article gave me plenty of descriptive words, so whether or not I agree with Christian's conclusions, I have the info I need to draw my own (or hold fire on forming a final opinion, which is what we should all be doing really).

This reminds me of recent discussion about review scores (in which I got a little heated at times, in the "not really actually annoyed" way that I always get heated on here). On that same basis, I don't care whether another site felt more positive, just like tbh I don't really care whether Christian felt positive about the game or not. I care whether he gave me info to decide myself, which he did, so a job well done.

Blarggh....

Sounds if fallout 3 is everything everyone worried about.

Does it retain anything from the original apart from the colour pallette, and pip boy stuff.

I'm also alarmed taht the previewer pointed out rich content was a quality bethseda, 99% of oblivion was guff.

Meh, conflicted on this one.

I'm standing firm with my pre-order of the collector's edition! There I said it.

I'm sure this isn't going to be the perfect game that some people were expecting/hoping for, but then again what game has been released that isn't slightly flawed in some way? None, there are no perfect games out there.

I was hoping for more than NPC's not reacting to gunshots etc, seems a bit sloppy. However, Fable 2 will provide that level of realism/interactivity by the sounds of it, so I'll still be getting both games after all.

@Demiath

A lot of the old RPGs that used turn based combat (which I loved too) did so because that was the only way the systems of the time could handle combat with multiple opponents. A few old dev veterans have been quite open about this, and if they could have done a real time combat that contained the same level of depth, they would have done so.

RPGs are very stat heavy, which is to be expected as character development is a major part of the deal. In some respects turn based combat is the easy way out, as it makes the task of including all of the relevant character stats a whole lot easier (nothing is simpler than rolling as bunch of dice). Creating a real time system, that gives the player direct control, but STILL includes all of the relevant character stats into the bargain is a much harder design task.

Tbh, it doesn't quite sound as though Bethesda have solved the problem cleanly. I guess my point is that just because older RPGs used turn based systems, we shouldn't necessarily assume that they did so because it was the most desirable system. Game dev is as much about what can reasonably be put in place as it is about great ideas on paper.

Looks like EG are determined to stick the knife into this game, every time they preview it they hate it more.

People seem to be worrying about this based on comparisons to Oblivion. Surely, if Oblivion was a game you hated, it is safe to say that FO3 won't float your boat.

I loved Oblivion, so for me any comparisons are a good thing. It wasn't perfect, but it is a great start point for any new product.

I am still holding judgement on this one. Partly because I want to be optimistic, and partly because FO has always been a deep game, and no amount of short previews are going to test its mettle properly (no critisism of the article btw).

"Looks like EG are determined to stick the knife into this game, every time they preview it they hate it more."

Why so defensive. Maybe it sucks ass. Maybe it will be the shittest game ever made. Its a possibility you know. We both hope its not true, but its a possibility. And it won't be EG's fault if it is.

Why are people so defensive about this. Its just a game.

Mass Effect's dialogue system was praised by EG? Well it's good, but hardly anything new. EG you disappoint me!

Err, it sounds OK, I guess..

I loved Oblivion but since then I have been spoilt by Mass Effect, the best game I have played this year, just my opinion of course. I really doubt Fallout 3 will beat that. The quests sound promising, I enjoyed Oblivion questing so I suppose I'll probably end up buying it at some point after its release. Shame that it doesn't jump out at me as a must buy though.

@Demiath - Personally I prefer the more realistic "real-time" combat of both Oblivion and to a certain extent Mass Effect (you could still pause that game though if you wanted to) over turn-based combat, mainly because the world you played in felt realistic and was thus more immersive, especially as you experienced it in first-person (ideally). Having turn-based combat would certainly have felt out of place and sucked me out of the game, particularly as you quested alone anyway not as a party as with most other RPGs. Turn-based combat is certainly better for party-based RPGs as it gives you greater control but it's not really suited to solo RPGs IMHO.

It's funny, but the problems they have with it seem to be that it's too much like the Fallout games of old (dialogue trees especially).

NMA must be feeling a little silly about now. Especially as the things they find so precious are actually the things no one will like. Hmmmm.

ME's shooty bits felt like a lame TPS, but it was a sweet short game with redundant side quests. I hope this game turns out better.

The negative aspects pointed out in this Hand On are relevant sure, but so many fantastic games have such unrealistic tendancies that it becomes part of the character of the game. You couldn't see enemies that would attack you in FF VII, and would be attacked randomly, yet it worked perfectly.

You could pause time in KOTOR, totally unrealistic, yet it also worked perfectly. I don't see a problem with dialogue unless the dialogue is poorly written - the purpose is to convey characters and plot, not to recreate a real world conversation which while it would be an ambitious objective, is not what Bethesda are trying to do at all.

even the originals, in isometric form, of all things, came out a good 7 years after Ultima Underworld had introduced 3D RPG'ing. Classical design faults do not hinder genuinely great games.

even the originals, in isometric form, of all things, came out a good 7 years after Ultima Underworld had introduced 3D RPG'ing. Classical design faults do not hinder genuinely great games.


Not quite sure what you mean with that example, are you saying the isometric perspective of the Fallout games was a design fault? It was one of the games strengths, in my opinion. As I pointed out earlier, an isometric perspective leaves more room for your mind to fill gaps in the world design, in my opinion.

Only skimmed the preview and the comment, like, suuuper duuuper fast!!!11, but this is the first time I've seen such a negative preview from EG. Usually I feel these give the game the benefit of the doubt.