Fallout 3 Comments by Christian Donlan

Still sounds like a Bethesda game.

Btw this journalist has swallowed the Mass Effect hype all the way it seems.

I think it makes little sense to compare Mass Effect and Fallout. For me, Mass Effect felt closer even to a game like Half-Life than it did to Oblivion - I enjoyed it loads but it was very lacking in content, scope and player choice when compared to Oblivion.

Personally I'd be massively disappointed if F3 turned out anything like Mass Effect, and delighted if it turned out as well as Oblivion. But the fact that Oblivion is thought of as not just average but shit by quite a ferw posters here and elsewhere, goes to show that some people just won't like Fallout. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

I wonder how the previewer feels about Oblivion. Perhaps he could tell us?

@ kangarootoo

why so defensive?

well it seems to be one of those games that EG just doesn't like, it'll probably get an 8/10 in the review ;-)

'Fallout 3 may represent the future of yesterday's RPGs, going back to when they were cruel, stubborn, and yet filled with memorable stories, rather than an evolution of the flashy, friendly, and often anaemic titles of today.'

^^^^

Nobody read this bit, then? I'll definitely be getting this - it may not match the first two classics in the series, it will probably feel stilted and buggy in parts (all Bethesda games do), but it will also almost certainly be better than 90% of the other games available. Mass Effect was, for me, a very well directed, but ultimately shallow, repetitive and linear experience. I can put up with ropey graphics and forgetful AI if I can enjoy freedom and the ability to enjoy my own experience of the game - with Mass Effect I just felt I was being driven down the same corridor that everyone else playing the game had also experienced - not really my definition of an RPG.

Oh, and the collector's edition Vault Tec lunchbox is simply too tempting ;)

That quote is, like, totally backwards.

Really sounds like it'll be a disappointment. The bar scene mentioned also was a bit disheartening.
The accidental shot should have caused a bit of a chaos, perhaps caused them to shoot at you making you have to run out and stay away for a little while until they calmed down. Slight mistakes like that and having to deal with the consequences would make for a good "I was playing Fallout 3 and you know that bar, well you never guess what happened when I tried to talk to some guy..." beginning of a story.
Can they even make patches big enough to fix all this? Really sounds promising. Hopefully they can pull a rabbit out of the hat to sort if out.
I'll probably wait until it makes it inevitable way to the bargain bin before I pick it up. I'll put it on the "Maybe" list for the moment.

Fallout 3 is sticking with a system largely unchanged from the days of Monkey Island.

I am so getting this game!

@koji_m

But everything I have read has based its negativity on things the journo in quest in saw with their own eyes, and their descriptions made me concerned too. However, everything I have read on EG about FO3 has also left the door open, with a comment along the lines of "we didn't get to see XYZ, which has traditionally been FO's strength" or "90 mins isn't really enough to see what FO3 has to offer".

Seems to me they are calling it as they see it, and that currently there are some causes for concern.

The bar scene in itself is a joke considering how they have hyped their Radiant AI. Outcast had AI reacting to such things in 2000 for christs sake.

"Mass Effect was, for me, a very well directed, but ultimately shallow, repetitive and linear experience."

Agreed. I'm playing the game at the moment, and am enjoying it in many ways, however it does get repetitive and I've had to put it down for a few days so I don't get bored of it. The main missions aren't samey, but all the side quests ultimately seem fairly similar and merge into one another, and to me it seems pointless to play the game without doing the side missions.

What's with a lot of the maps having exactly the same layout - that does get very boring, very quickly!

Also in terms of the dialogue layout for ME, I like it, it's hardly revolutionary, but it does feel very intuitive and fluid.

'Fallout 3 may represent the future of yesterday's RPGs, going back to when they were cruel, stubborn, and yet filled with memorable stories, rather than an evolution of the flashy, friendly, and often anaemic titles of today.'

Sold!

"Mass Effect was, for me, a very well directed, but ultimately shallow, repetitive and linear experience."

also agreed

Agreed x3.

Mass Effect was a shooter with RPG bits tacked on, and hopefully Fallout 3 will feel like an RPG with shooter elements tacked. That will suit me down to the ground.

And anyway, if I want a shooter first, RPG second set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear world, I've got STALKER Clear Sky coming any day now :D

i really hope this gets delayed...as it sounds like eurogamer were reaching to try and compliment this game but couldnt whole heartedly do so. A case of quantity over quality is worthless if its no fun to play...you're just getting more of a bad game for your buck. I'm sure Two worlds had a great story..but who would care to invest in it?

the bar scene is just one of several examples i've seen of the bad AI. in the developer walk through you can see the guy on the bridge just crouches doing nothing while you shoot at him, then suddenly he pulls out a rifle! and before that scene, where he attacks a group of 3 soldiers one of them runs up and does nothing. then when he has his arm shot off he doesn't even flinch!

so far as what has been shown of the game the AI has been 100% bad in my opinion. i haven't even seen enemies take cover, they just seem to run towards you and don't even attack properly, and in some cases (like at the bridge) they don't even attack you... i would say bad AI is what worries me the most.

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.

My thoughts exactly. I can get more information from one (justified) negative paragraph than a whole page of superlatives.

As far as the Mass Effect radial dialogue conversations went, they aren't really too different from the standard old-school dialogue trees are they?

All you get is -

- the general gist of what you're going to say rather than the full dialogue (which is fine but not exactly ground-breaking).
- "good guy" dialogue near the top and "bad guy" dialogue near the bottom. For retards who can't figure it out on their own, when given a choice between "Calm down, we can talk about this" and "Take them all out!"

It didn't stop me repeating some conversations and choosing different branches of the tree the second time around.

Having said that, I still enjoyed Mass Effect, and probably will more than I will Fallout 3 (which is a shame, as I have, and loved, Fallout 1, 2 and even Brotherhood of Steel [PC version, not the revamped console version of the same name]).

My prediction: 7/10.

ive always thought the art style in bethesda games were really shit to be honest.

The bar scene in itself is a joke considering how they have hyped their Radiant AI. Outcast had AI reacting to such things in 2000 for christs sake.


Yup. Outcast and Gothic 1/2 were really top of the class there - or rather, remarkably, they still are. It's frustrating that there really hasn't been any progress in these areas in the last 8 years or so. That said, even Ultima handled stuff like this better than Oblivion did.

This is coming out about the same time as Fable 2. Doesnt it? I dont have time for both anyway so i might go for Fable 2. Im not a fan of RPGs but i usually buy one every year.

I didnt enjoy Oblivion as much as Mass effect btw. Both games are very good but not among my favourites. Didnt like the option to change the difficulty whenever you felt like it in Oblivion, to temting to abuse it when you almost die.

@Pulsar_t: "ME's shooty bits felt like a lame TPS, but it was a sweet short game with redundant side quests."

All side quests in all RPGs are by definition redundant. If they weren't they wouldn't be side quests, they'd be part of the main quest.

If I hadn't read EG's previews I would have thought Fallout 3 was a lock for GotY based on what I've read everywhere else.

ME's dialogue system was awesome

It's off my wishlist now unfortunately. I'm not a fan of stats heavy RPG's and was hoping for the FPS aspects of this game to counter it but as that appears to be clunky at best I'll avoid this. Fable 2 has taken it's place as my most anticipated RPG.

"I didnt enjoy Oblivion as much as Mass effect btw. Both games are very good but not among my favourites. Didnt like the option to change the difficulty whenever you felt like it in Oblivion, to temting to abuse it when you almost die."

You can do that in ME also...I have to admit using it once before, but then I felt like I'd cheated myself and vowed never to do it again ;)

Right! Who said Bethesda couldn't screw up Fallout? Come on I know I heard someone say it. I'm just going to kick you in the nads....it's not gonna hurt a bit....honest...

Wow, how can people not get the Mass Effect dialouge trees? I thought they were amazing. Fucking hell, I have not ever laughed as much before or since playing that game, I was in tears -

After completing a main planets missions and reporting to the Council onboard the Normandy you can get all pissy with them when they slag you off no matter what you do/say. The Turian on the council wise cracks about you destroying something and you can reply with something along the lines of "we should of destroyed you when we had the chance", you get bollocked but an option comes up for you to disconnect from the meeting early, press it and Shepard pulls a wise crack out of the bag which had me crying.

The next time you speak to them, they warn you about it, I apologised before they starting giving me more shit about it, then disconnected with an even funnier quip.

Probably sounds shit reading it, but the dialouge in ME was so fucking good

dialogue in real life is better.

but not a revolution in implementation.... its about the same as KOTOR. There have been plenty of games with good scripts.

I wish EG would be a bit more specific with regards to the dodgy combat mechanics. How bad can "move cursor over enemy, pull trigger" get? Does the combat feel equally bad in both first and third-person modes? Is it a matter of perspective, stick sensitivity, acceleration, all of the above?

And also, how about some comments on PC vs. XBox, especially with regard to combat. Will combat also be crap with a mouse? Of all of FO3's ambitions, this seems like the most unlikely thing to get wrong...

@Kangarootoo

Interesting and illuminating comments on my original post, Kangarootoo! However, regardless of what the designers of classic RPGs themselves would have wanted to do in their games if they could, I would personally argue that real-time combat in single player RPGs has, in practice, more often than not shown itself to be a serious mistake. Far from assuming that turn-based combat *must* be better simply because old games were turn-based, I talk from personal experience as a gamer who started out with real-time games (such as the Elder Scrolls games) and then found myself gradually moving towards older, turn-based games I hadn't previously played (Wizardry 8, Temple of Elemental Evil, Might & Magic 6-8 etc.).

There are several reasons for the superiority of turn-based combat systems, the arguably most important being that the the relatively slow pace of turn-based combat enables you to approach the combat situation in a much more tactical manner; simply because you actually have time to think through different approaches to a particular situation, counter enemy moves in more complex ways as well as engage more enemies at the same time.

In real-time games, I think most players (certainly myself included) rely heavily on a limited selection of spells and combat skills and spend a lot of their time frantically trying to move the player character away from incoming fireballs or dodge enemy broadswords. This might work well in an action game but, needless to say, it hardly leaves any room for more advanced tactical considerations than "let's throw an ice bolt and run like hell" and the like (remember that I refer exclusively to single player games here; MMORPGs can potentially include more advanced combat situations due to the wonders of human cooperation, but since I don't play MMORPGs I can't comment on that).

It's important to note that this is not primarily a design issue (especially since the amount of available spells, combat skills and other options may in theory be just as high in an action-oriented RPG as in a turn-based one), but rather a limitation on how much information a human player can process during a short period of time and how fast he or she can react to a given situation. And it's certainly hard to see how even the most ingenious game developers could ever work their way around a flaw that's not in their code but essentially in our brains and reflexes.

In conclusion, I maintain that RPGs should be turn-based or "pause-oriented" in order to maximize the genre's specific potentials.

People are really missing the point about the dialogue in Mass Effect; The point is, you selected the rough direction you wanted to go in and then your character actually responded as part of the conversation or, on one memorable occasion in my game, pulled out a gun and shot someone:-) In most WRPGs you never actually hear your side of the conversation...

The thing that really puts me off is the suggestion that we are going to get those same horrible Elder Scrolls style conversations with the NPCs standing stock still and staring out of the screen at you with as much emotional response as a pod person while you treat them as some sort of semi-mobile information terminal.

The conversations in Mass Effect were about as dynamic and involving as I've seen in a game where you can choose a response, mostly due to your character actually speaking the lines. This is based on the female commander, BTW.

I've just found that Fallout 3 won best in show atE3 http://www.gamecriticsawards.com/winners...

Big difference in opinion there it seems.

There's a lot of games that you play thinking 'if this was a little better it'd be absolutely amazing' and this will be one of them....that's nice enough for plenty of gamers....but in the back of your mind there's that niggle, you know your brain has to fill in more than it should for it to be 10/10

plenty of devs out there who either don't have the vision, but execute really well (NG2 (pre patch!), Rainbow6) and plenty of devs who have the vision but don't have the execution (Theif3, this)....

weird thing is there's a group of about 20 devs in this group, that all think they're the best dev team in the world.

And then there's Valve..

sounds to me like it'll get a 7. Maybe an 8, but probably a 7.

I'll get it anyway!

Confirmed: Fallout 3 is not the second coming of Christ.

Now, I'm off to preorder...

"People are really missing the point about the dialogue in Mass Effect; The point is, you selected the rough direction you wanted to go in and then your character actually responded as part of the conversation or, on one memorable occasion in my game, pulled out a gun and shot someone:-) In most WRPGs you never actually hear your side of the conversation...

The thing that really puts me off is the suggestion that we are going to get those same horrible Elder Scrolls style conversations with the NPCs standing stock still and staring out of the screen at you with as much emotional response as a pod person while you treat them as some sort of semi-mobile information terminal.

The conversations in Mass Effect were about as dynamic and involving as I've seen in a game where you can choose a response, mostly due to your character actually speaking the lines. This is based on the female commander, BTW."

This x 100.

Still, I won't mind the Oblivion-ish dialogue as much if it's well voice acted. Oblivion is second only to Fable when it comes to the most embarrassing voice acting in an RPG (that I've played, mind - I'm sure there are other stinkers out there).

Not a bad article, sounds like Oblivion with a better story... me getting :D

Seriously though, I thought the article was good, it did mention things that as a game engine progresses you expect to be fixed, the bar scene being one of the things you expect, eg breaking into a place and it being open sounds rubbish. shooting a gun in a bar should make some reaction. These things dont ruin a game but kinda spoil the overall enjoyement.

But the one comment i have to admit that made me laugh the most was the comment that the Mass Effect dialogue system was so great, I'm sorry, its just a dialogue tree like any other game, and its just on a cool dial... sorry but it is no better :)

So overall I think I will still love this game, but will be slightly disappointed when getting the same kinda issues that I hit in Oblivion. But please no more about ME and its dialogue system! ;)

Fair enough about Mass Effect having the most cinematic dialog system I've seen in a game. It fits it quite well and I see the point about choosing attitudes instead of answers.

But what makes that style better than the traditional? Sure, different, but why should suddenly all RPG:s use the system that many find flawed? It's funny, Donlan mentions Halo's regenerating shield as a genre standard, but personally I don't care much for it. Must all RPG:s from now on be Mass Effect, an action RPG?

It's (by itself) retarded criticism, that's what. Why should Mass Effects system fit Fallout 3 more than the current? The article just makes the point that it's better and expects everybody to accept it. Someone made a good example by mentioning Planescape Torment; would it work with just choosing a general attitude in all conversations?


The article also makes some other strange connections, such as labeling the bar door being closed as "old fashioned" when it's just stupid. Nothing more to it.

HHHmmmmm not positive, they seem to have a massive story and not bothered about QC glitches and a un user friendly control system.
Sounds like Betheseda needs to get their fingers out and either delay and rework or put or better demos with all the bugs glithces fixed.
Bethesesda seems to be content rather than quality/ease of use etc.

Lol, could see this coming a mile off!

Am I the only one who can't see why this game is good? The premise sounds lame as hell. The graphics look awful & colourless. The E3 demo was just boring. It just doesn't look exciting. I'll be waiting for the price drop on this one, me thinks.

EGs tone has already improved considerably since their earlier preview. It's an 8/10 I says!

and the eurogamer pre-release mauling continues...curious how other game jounralists percieve this game?
just read a gamespot preview and it was useless, all "i went here and did this, then went there and did that." sort of along the level of what grade schooler writes when describing his summer vacation.

@Demiath

"I would personally argue that real-time combat in single player RPGs has, in practice, more often than not shown itself to be a serious mistake"

I won't disagree with that statement. I think ther key part is "in practise". I suggested that devs in bygone years went down the turn-based approach because they weren't able to get the real time expereince they wanted at the time. Some devs tried anyway, and we both agree that the results were poor.

I'm not sure what I am heading toward here. Endorsing the pursuit of an unachievable goal is rather pointless, so I'm not necessarily saying that devs SHOULD have gone for real time solutions. But maybe now is the time to try that approach? Deus Ex had a stab at it, and did ok.

"It's important to note that this is not primarily a design issue (especially since the amount of available spells, combat skills and other options may in theory be just as high in an action-oriented RPG as in a turn-based one), but rather a limitation on how much information a human player can process during a short period of time and how fast he or she can react to a given situation"

Actually, I think this is a crucial point, and I'm starting to come around somewhat. I guess it is not a matter of whetyher one system is better than another, but more a matter of which system better suits the type of game you are trying to make. Turn based Quake, whilst it might be a lot of fun to play, would not meet the brief that iD no doubt set themselves. So in that case it would not have been a suitable system. For something like Baldur's gate (specifically because the player controls a party of characters, it is perhaps the only viable solution)... though RTS games are essentially multi-party-member games, in real time, with a slightly different presentation method.

@kangarootoo
For something like Baldur's gate (specifically because the player controls a party of characters, it is perhaps the only viable solution)... though RTS games are essentially multi-party-member games, in real time, with a slightly different presentation method.

That's one way of looking at it. However, in rts your control over situation is limited to chosing size of the group and sending them somewhere on the map, the rest is done by ai. In RTS, it doesn't hinder the game as the goal of gameply is different than in RPG games. When it comes to RPG games, the focus is usually on statistics of single units/heroes, each equipped with multitude of skills/spells. As was already mentioned before, in real time situation there is only so many actions a player can perform per time unit, which would result in most of the skills being unused, simply due to time constraints. Giving player more time for decisions, either by providing turn based combat or pause, allows to enjoy the full potential of the game, instead of relegating player to passive spectator of on screen actions of game AI.

You see, I loved (and still love) Oblivion, all the while fully aware of its flaws and limitations. A couple of years on, though, you expect some of those flaws to have been surpassed. I'm not sure I can overlook those same flaws in a new game.

Definitively (hard word that for a swede, probably got it wrong) a buy, I love Oblivion, and the Fallout series.
Can it get any better? Well some parts probably, but not the depth described (and in oblivion).
Its only a couple of months away and hopefully a couple of months playing.

@haldier

The word you were looking for was "definitely", but other than that, your English is better than my Swedish, which is limited to "Är din dotter sexton?".

;-)