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 KingCracker wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Metacritic is a joke.

They gave FO3 a better score than FNV, when FNV had better gameplay, story, character interaction and an actual crafting system.

No I disagree. FO3 HAS the better story, by a long shot. But the overall gameplay goes to FNV hands down. Whenever asked, I say "FO3 for the story, and FNV if you want to really get into playing the game"

Fo3 had better story? So basically fo3 is like this you looking for your dad with the description of "middle aged guy" and then POOF!! bad guys and you shoot some bad guys and in the end press A for good and B for bad. (also B option makes no sense from any perspective)

In New Vegas story follow two different factions as they fight over a strategic asset.

I had thought bethesda had said they wouldn't be putting out any major DLC but still had a few small things like hearthfire to be released?

Did anyone see the new teaser yesterday?

 Medium of Death wrote:
So does that mean the rumoured Redguard dlc isn't actually coming out?

dont think so...Maybe planning to create TES VI called Redguard? We'll see what they future will bring

 illuknisaa wrote:
In New Vegas story follow two different factions as they fight over a strategic asset.

That's a mechanic, not a story.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Metacritic is a joke.

They gave FO3 a better score than FNV, when FNV had better gameplay, story, character interaction and an actual crafting system.

You forgot to mention how it also has a variety of new and exciting game-breaking bugs that can render the game unplayable, particularly if you were foolish enough to buy it on PS3.

 Rotgut wrote:
Did anyone see the new teaser yesterday?

Bethesda said it's not teasing FO4.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Each to his own I guess. I didn't enjoy the story to FO3 that much.

That's probably because it wasn't very good.

It was excellent, actually.

What made it so excellent?

First, FO3 wasn't post-apoc merely as a matter of graphics. Its story actually explored the genre rather than the game simply using the genre as a setting. Second, it explored the genre in a convincing and personal way. The game, i.e., the sum of all the possible stories, is basically about the relationship between recovery and identity. The quest for your father, Project Purity, the truth about the Enclave, all these elements -- and of course so many more -- add up to a very reflective and poignant story about how getting past a crisis rather than the crisis itself is what changes people, what makes anyone who they are.

Hmm.. wonder if the rumours of Redguard are totally bogus, or Bethesda has pulled a Volition ala Saints Row 4, and figured it was potentially too awesome to just be a DLC.

When Skyrim came out, Todd Howard said Bethesda had concluded after FO3 that they weren't interested in doing further development on this-gen consoles. So if that's how they felt before Skyrim, I guess they would have been seriously done afterward.

 Manchu wrote:
First, FO3 wasn't post-apoc merely as a matter of graphics. Its story actually explored the genre rather than the game simply using the genre as a setting. Second, it explored the genre in a convincing and personal way. The game, i.e., the sum of all the possible stories, is basically about the relationship between recovery and identity. The quest for your father, Project Purity, the truth about the Enclave, all these elements -- and of course so many more -- add up to a very reflective and poignant story about how getting past a crisis rather than the crisis itself is what changes people, what makes anyone who they are.

How is fedex quests fun or interesting? (finding your dad)

Project purity has no meaning at all during the game (press A for good and B for bad)

The Enclave just appear out of nowhere (like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtCaMxH1Lzo )

Bethesda RPGs are about exploration -- not for its own sake but for the sake of a narrative experience. The quests are just milestones that help contextualize at a higher level all the ground-level world discovery you are playing from moment to momentl. FO3's higher level narrative was cleverly environmental. In any given moment of play, the radioactivity of water is present, preparing you for and nudging your thoughts back to the main quest. The more you play FO3, whether zoomed in on a particular moment or surveying the broader scope of the narrative environment, the more personal it becomes. All these quests just give you a little definition, a point A and a point B, that lend definition (and thereby, further dimensions of meaning) to your exploration.

I was very moved, for example, by the quest where you go back to the vault. When you first leave, the game has your vision blurred by the sudden experience of harsh, alien sunlight. Looking around for the first time, I was overcome by a feeling of not being prepared, not being strong enough to survive this. When Amata asked me to leave the vault a hundred or so hours later, it was kind of heart breaking. But I realized, everything I feared about the world at the beginning of the game -- at this point, a hundred hours later, I had become all of those things. I was the most dangerous thing in the Wasteland. My friend looked at me and saw all the things that I had initially feared.

That kind of emotional depth is rare in video games even today when designers are largely aware that it is both possible and profitable. In my experience, FO3 had lots of moments like that -- and I can tell it was by design rather than accident. That's why I say it had a stronger story.

 Manchu wrote:
Bethesda RPGs are about exploration -- not for its own sake but for the sake of a narrative experience. The quests are just milestones that help contextualize at a higher level all the ground-level world discovery you are playing from moment to momentl. FO3's higher level narrative was cleverly environmental. In any given moment of play, the radioactivity of water is present, preparing you for and nudging your thoughts back to the main quest. The more you play FO3, whether zoomed in on a particular moment or surveying the broader scope of the narrative environment, the more personal it becomes. All these quests just give you a little definition, a point A and a point B, that lend definition (and thereby, further dimensions of meaning) to your exploration.

I was very moved, for example, by the quest where you go back to the vault. When you first leave, the game has your vision blurred by the sudden experience of harsh, alien sunlight. Looking around for the first time, I was overcome by a feeling of not being prepared, not being strong enough to survive this. When Amata asked me to leave the vault a hundred or so hours later, it was kind of heart breaking. But I realized, everything I feared about the world at the beginning of the game -- at this point, a hundred hours later, I had become all of those things. I was the most dangerous thing in the Wasteland. My friend looked at me and saw all the things that I had initially feared.

That kind of emotional depth is rare in video games even today when designers are largely aware that it is both possible and profitable. In my experience, FO3 had lots of moments like that -- and I can tell it was by design rather than accident. That's why I say it had a stronger story.

Of course, that whole "You've become what we fear of the outside world." scene was lifted straight from the ending of Fallout 1. Just with a less satisfying resolution.

Sure, it's homage. Right down to the water chip. Its comparative effectiveness is a matter of perspective. I liked how FO3 handled it because it wasn't the final word. I went back into the Wasteland and went on living there with that experience -- and it had the chance to effect my continuing game play. Of course, it's a great ending, too.

We're using vastly different definitions of quality here. FO3 may have epitomized the thematic staples of a post-apocalyptic setting, but it wasn't put together very well beneath the surface of the story (like the whole thing where FO by that point isn't so much post-apoc as post-post-apoc; it's the fledgling rebirth of civilization coming into conflict with the remnants of the dark age that followed the war).

NV may have lacked depth, storywise, but it was pieced together in a much more coherent, rational way. The world worked, and it revolved around a conflict between two brutal factions, both of which were improvements over the tribal anarchy they replaced, with the "good" side being the one that had progressed the farthest from that state, rather than FO3's nonsense factions of cartoonish-villains and inexplicably-nice-rebellious-authority-figures that seem to be doing their best to be Hollywood cliches.

It was also a great improvement mechanically, particularly with Project: NEVADA installed to de-level health and partially de-level weapon damage, making it into a proper shooter (in addition to all the other little mechanical changes it had).


As for the pre-FO3 games: Tactics is the only one that's remotely playable, FO1-2 suffer from a fatal case of "'90s Interface Syndrome" which is so severe as to render them all but impossible to play. They're slow-paced, clunky, and so terribly unpleasant to play I never managed to get past the first town in either before realizing that plodding around trying to talk to characters and find things using an interface that seemed purposefully designed to make that as unpleasant and unwieldy a task as possible was almost the exact opposite of anything anyone should do, ever.





Maybe Bethesda just has a problem with coherent world-building these days. Skyrim was absolutely amazing, and I logged at least a couple of hundred hours in it, playing different character archetypes and trying to see everything that was worth seeing, but the story made exactly no sense if one actually read any certain of the in universe books (the Empire, after suffering some initial setbacks, kicks the snot out of the Thalmor... then turns around and all but surrenders to them? ).

 Manchu wrote:
Bethesda RPGs are about exploration -- not for its own sake but for the sake of a narrative experience. The quests are just milestones that help contextualize at a higher level all the ground-level world discovery you are playing from moment to momentl. FO3's higher level narrative was cleverly environmental. In any given moment of play, the radioactivity of water is present, preparing you for and nudging your thoughts back to the main quest. The more you play FO3, whether zoomed in on a particular moment or surveying the broader scope of the narrative environment, the more personal it becomes. All these quests just give you a little definition, a point A and a point B, that lend definition (and thereby, further dimensions of meaning) to your exploration.

I was very moved, for example, by the quest where you go back to the vault. When you first leave, the game has your vision blurred by the sudden experience of harsh, alien sunlight. Looking around for the first time, I was overcome by a feeling of not being prepared, not being strong enough to survive this. When Amata asked me to leave the vault a hundred or so hours later, it was kind of heart breaking. But I realized, everything I feared about the world at the beginning of the game -- at this point, a hundred hours later, I had become all of those things. I was the most dangerous thing in the Wasteland. My friend looked at me and saw all the things that I had initially feared.

That kind of emotional depth is rare in video games even today when designers are largely aware that it is both possible and profitable. In my experience, FO3 had lots of moments like that -- and I can tell it was by design rather than accident. That's why I say it had a stronger story.

Propably the only thing Bethesda can do right is environmental design (=/= level design, they suck at that) but exploration can't hold on its' own and need to have other gameplay elements to support it. The other gameplay elements are just poor. They are actually so poor that they drag down the one thing that is good. The harsh wasteland doesn't seem so harsh when you have boat loads of stimpacks, ammo and bottlecaps.

Stalker CoP also has this post apoc setting and while its' exploration isn't as strong as fo3's it isn't dragged down by the poor combat or survival aspects. When the quest giver says there some really scary mosters those monsters are really scary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaHQrwEwvZs
(note that he is also sneaking in broad daylight)

Metacritic is hardly the arbiter of whether a game is any good or not but it does an excellent job of showing the popularity of said game.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:
NV may have lacked depth, storywise, but it was pieced together in a much more coherent, rational way.

Keep in mind that FNV is set later than FO3 and in an area not nearly as devastated as the Capital Wasteland. In FNV, the apocalypse is a distant fact -- sort of like what the Civil War is for contemporary Americans. Instead of post-apoc, FNV is what you might call neo-Western. The story is about the reinvented American frontier, with manifest destiny moving west to east rather than the other way around. In contrast to all of FNV's complex social organization, culture in the Capital Wasteland remained atomised.

The problem I have with FO3 is that it seemed to be created by people who just didn't really understand what Fallout is: like they had seen it played but never actually played it themselves. They tried to shoehorn in every element from the first two games that they could (Supermutants, The Enclave, Brotherhood of Steel, and even Harold), because, clearly, those elements must be what defines a Fallout game.
This video does a very good job of explaining the problems with FO3 compared to FNV. It's a bit of a long one, but very good to watch. You can skip to the 9:30 mark for the comparison part.

That was an interesting video but it makes a very telling assumption in order to favor FNV over FO3. At 11:58, the guys says "remember, you're working in a medium where the setting is the story." This is incorrect and ... honestly, kind of comes off as thougtless in the context of his other insightful points. This guy uses the Tristram Shandy metaphor to confuse the viewer into forgetting that a story is a narrative sequence of events that take place in a setting. Setting is not story; it is the context of story. If you evaluate a setting from the perspective of story, its sufficiency is a matter of whether it supports the story. Both the Capital Wasteland and the Mojave Wasteland measure up by that standard.

The question "what do they eat?" is actually relevant to the stories -- and not merely the settings -- of both FO3 and FNV. (Beyond that, it's a good question anyway in an exploration game since setting itself is the medium of exploration gameplay.) Unfortunately, the guy from the video glosses over the actual answers provided by FO3. There are many food items in FO3 and it's fair to say that most of them are pre-war consumer goods. Indeed, one of the very first quests available in FO3 involves scavenging a derelict super market held by Raiders. And remember, the point of doing so (the story part) is so Moira can write a book on how you survive in the Capital Wasteland. Megaton can exist for now because of its proximity to such locations as the derelict super market. So when the video guy later rhetorically notes that in FO3 people constructed a town next to an unexploded bomb but not close to a food source ... well, he's just showing his ass. That's right, they don't grow things in the Capital Wasteland. Why would that be? Oh right, that's the point of the story. But if you don't understand what story is, I can see how you could miss that.

Furthermore, why did they build Megaton around a bomb? Surely, that's good evidence of the guy's point that Bethesda only cares about setting as place in which gameplay happens rather than as a "shandified" story. No one in the Mojave Wasteland is stupid enough to build a town around a nuke, after all. Again, it would help to actually pay attention to the answers FO3 actually gives. Megaton is build from the wreckage of an airport. The bomb that dropped on the airport did not explode. Therefore, all the materials were left in one place and were relatively radiation free. The few people who can eek out a living in the Capital Wasteland have little to none of the mechanization of the pre-war world. That's why they couldn't move all the building materials away from the bomb. Also, consider how far away from the bomb you'd have to move those materials in order to be safe from it going off. And consider how dangerous it would be to leave the bomb out in the open where a Raider chief could claim it.

That video had some good insights, like I said, but it's a shame he didn't think a bit further.

There a super market and super markets don't grow food (moira even says that the super market is propably empty).

The story and setting of Fo3 are in confict between each other. The story main driving force is to get food but inorder to do so people had to be able to survive somehow. Surely 100 year old radiated canned food is still eatable right?

Skyrim was a little meh. I found it very bland, with boring visuals and lame combat.

Also, the PS3 version was complete gak. If Bethesda are going to do a console port they had better do it well.

 illuknisaa wrote:
There a super market and super markets don't grow food

Yes ... again, that's kind of the point. Life is just beginning to come back to the Capitol Wasteland but what's currently going down is not sustainable. Hence Project Purity.

 Manchu wrote:
That was an interesting video but it makes a very telling assumption in order to favor FNV over FO3. At 11:58, the guys says "remember, you're working in a medium where the setting is the story." This is incorrect and ... honestly, kind of comes off as thougtless in the context of his other insightful points. This guy uses the Tristram Shandy metaphor to confuse the viewer into forgetting that a story is a narrative sequence of events that take place in a setting. Setting is not story; it is the context of story. If you evaluate a setting from the perspective of story, its sufficiency is a matter of whether it supports the story. Both the Capital Wasteland and the Mojave Wasteland measure up by that standard.

The question "what do they eat?" is actually relevant to the stories -- and not merely the settings -- of both FO3 and FNV. (Beyond that, it's a good question anyway in an exploration game since setting itself is the medium of exploration gameplay.) Unfortunately, the guy from the video glosses over the actual answers provided by FO3. There are many food items in FO3 and it's fair to say that most of them are pre-war consumer goods. Indeed, one of the very first quests available in FO3 involves scavenging a derelict super market held by Raiders. And remember, the point of doing so (the story part) is so Moira can write a book on how you survive in the Capital Wasteland. Megaton can exist for now because of its proximity to such locations as the derelict super market. So when the video guy later rhetorically notes that in FO3 people constructed a town next to an unexploded bomb but not close to a food source ... well, he's just showing his ass. That's right, they don't grow things in the Capital Wasteland. Why would that be? Oh right, that's the point of the story. But if you don't understand what story is, I can see how you could miss that.

Furthermore, why did they build Megaton around a bomb? Surely, that's good evidence of the guy's point that Bethesda only cares about setting as place in which gameplay happens rather than as a "shandified" story. No one in the Mojave Wasteland is stupid enough to build a town around a nuke, after all. Again, it would help to actually pay attention to the answers FO3 actually gives. Megaton is build from the wreckage of an airport. The bomb that dropped on the airport did not explode. Therefore, all the materials were left in one place and were relatively radiation free. The few people who can eek out a living in the Capital Wasteland have little to none of the mechanization of the pre-war world. That's why they couldn't move all the building materials away from the bomb. Also, consider how far away from the bomb you'd have to move those materials in order to be safe from it going off. And consider how dangerous it would be to leave the bomb out in the open where a Raider chief could claim it.

That video had some good insights, like I said, but it's a shame he didn't think a bit further.

Unfortunately, I think you're basing your arguments off of incorrect information. FO3 takes place 200 YEARS after the bombs fell. There should, quite literally, be no food left to scavenge by that point (certainly none in any easy to reach locations after all this time). Additionally, Megaton was not built in an airport. There was an airport nearby, but the parts still had to be dragged to Megaton. The actual excuse given for the creation of Megaton is the crater formed by the bomb provided some shelter from the elements. The setting used in FO3 is just an enormous hodgepodge of locations and events that Bethesda threw together because it all seemed like a good idea, but there is no real cohesiveness to it.

The Capital was the focus of the attack. It's not that the Capital Wasteland has been as its presented in FO3 for the past 200 years. Life is just beginning to return. The human settlements we see are beginnings, relatively speaking. Remember the Great War started (and ended) in 2077. Rivet City was only founded in 2239 and it wasn't until decades later that Rivet City became a truly sustainable settlement thanks to Dr. Li. Megaton not much older, since it was founded by a living resident's father. It is also the only other major settlement in the Capital Wasteland and we're talking about dozens rather than hundreds of residents. Given how many Fancy Lad Snack Cakes are still around in 2277, I have no problem believing there had been enough of that crap laying around to support such a small population over the course of a relatively small amount of time.

FO3 is so much better than FO:NV. It's hardly Metacritic's fault that most critics think so.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
FO3 is so much better than FO:NV. It's hardly Metacritic's fault that most critics think so.

How is it better? The story doesn't make any sense, all the locations are placed around like in a themepark, gameplay is nothing but poor (most of the perks are either useless or overpowered)...

Only thing I think up is that locations look nice.

Your problem Illuknissa, is youre trying to argue everyones opinions with your opinions. That simply doesnt work. Just accept that yours is different from ours. Obviously you dont like FO3 because youve been arguing everyone that does since the first time it was brought up. Shut up already about it would ya?