1621

Yeah, I pretty much gave up on it. I guess I’ll wait for Borderlands and Rage, and the next Bethesda game gets the “wait-until-15-bucks” treatment from me :/

Or I find someone who’s finished it on the 360. :) It sems to be a sticky game though, people are always heading back to wrap this or that up.

1622

Operation Anchorage is kind of meh, but it has some of the most useful gear in the game, hands down.

Chinese Stealth Armor (from OA) + the Perforator (Pitt) + 100% sneak == iwinbutton.

1623

I see you’re sticking to the “it must be their fault” approach. Just ignore that the game has been out for months, sold millions of copies, and there was enough demand to justify 5 significant DLC expansions. I’m sure the technical issues you are having are entirely not your fault or related to your specific system.

:-)

1624

When I recently started playing Fallout 3 again, I downloaded all five DLCs, reviews be damned, and the first (and so far only) two that I’ve played have been Mothership Zeta and The Pitt, in that order. Mothership Zeta got a little same-y by the end, but I played it at levels 6-7, and at a low level it’s a lot of fun and gives you some really useful gear. If you get it, play it early, especially if you decide to focus on energy weapons.

I played the Pitt from levels 12-13, and although the gear it gave me wasn’t quite as useful overall, I thought it was a lot of fun. The big plot twist in it was pretty cool, too.

1625

Hmm. I don’t know. It seems as if some games, regardless of sales numbers, have more issues than others. Is Fallout 3 really as stable as, let’s say, WoW or The Sims 3? How about ArmA 2? Are all the bug reports and tech complaints because of user error or shoddy systems?

1626

I didn’t say it was bug free, or even that it doesn’t have more issues then it should. But at some point if you are having catastrophic problems that make the game unplayable with a game and the majority of folks are not, you have to start accepting that it may be problem at your end. Blaming the developer gets harder and harder to justify the fewer people that are affected by specific catastrophic problem.

1627

Sarkus

That’s where you’re going to go? Blame the end users? Sure, we’re all dumb and don’t configure out systems correctly and so on. But it’s not a small amount. Check out some forums, do some google searches. I’m not alone in my problems at all. Nor or some of the others with theirs.

Bethsoft isn’t fixing bugs in any sort of timely manner. You’re suggestion is that the bugs don’t exist? Or that they are such a small percentage that they shouldn’t bother with them? Neither of those are true.

Do me a favor, take your mouth of Bethsofts teat before you post next time, mkay? We’re all big Fallout 3 fans here, and probably most of us Bethsoft fans. That doesn’t mean we’re blind to problems in their games…like some people apparently are.

1628

Or, you know, the game might just have catastrophic problems on a very small number of machines. That shit happens, man. There are enough bizarre configurations out there that even exhaustive testing is never going to catch them all. It’s not a slam on bethesda to admit that kind of shit can happen, even without user error.

BTW, for those having serious crashing issues with Fallout 3 - do you have the community codec pack? If you do, have you made Fallout 3’s executable one of the excluded applications for ffdshow? That cleared up almost all of my crashing - the two do not play nicely together.

1629

Yep. Even uninstalled it. I’m a computer guy by trade and I’m not too dumb most of the time. I’ve spent literal hours, more than few, trying to get Fallout 3 working. With suggestions from their forums, their site, other forums, other places, random places google came up with, etc. Nothing worked.

I’ve given up on it until I do Windows 7 install. Not because I think Windows 7 will fix it, but I’ll do a clean format and start my system again then. I can’t see doing that for Fallout 3. Especially when googling suggests that doesn’t fix all the time.

1630

Hey, buddy, pal-o-kid, have you heard of this thing called the micro-stutter? Let me fill you in, just in case:

It’s this odd anomaly that basically causes the game to skip every other frame, resulting in a rather immersion-wrecking, unenjoyable experience.

What causes it? Good question. Having followed the many users that have had the same problem, we’ve concluded one thing: we don’t fucking know. Nobody fucking knows. Apparently Bethesda doesn’t fucking know, since they haven’t even mentioned it, despite the many threads and posts this past God damn year asking for at LEAST recognition of the problem.

Sure, we, the community, have figured out some things, like: it’s possibly determined by your hardware configuration, but as to what specific configurations cause it is unknown; possible software workarounds that eliminate the problem but cause new ones; some users had the same thing with the previous Gamebryo-engine game Oblivion now have it with Fallout 3, or didn’t have it with Oblivion but have it with Fallout 3, or don’t have it with Fallout 3 but had it with Oblivion.

So, as I wait for either Bethesda to finally release a patch that resolves this issue, a hope that is getting more and more bleak everytime they release one as “preparation” for one of their new DLC packs, or for a community member to figure out a true workaround, I will keep trying new things to resolve it myself so I can finally play the damn near year-old game I pre-ordered. So far done: several installs, new Windows install, new Windows install on a new hard drive, RAM replace, Video Card replaced. Up next: motherboard, CPU, faith in a higher power.

Basically, Sarkus, what I’m trying to say is fuck you.

1631

I’m not blaming the end users for the bug, I’m suggesting that there is something about their specific hardware/software combination that is causing a problem that does not affect most users and expecting a developer to fix that almost a year after release is unrealistic. Blaming them for not fixing it is also unrealistic.

When Half-Life 2 came out it would simply not run on my brand new for a month PC. It wouldn’t launch at all. I tried everything (being a PC gamer for 20+ years), scouring several boards for weeks and it turned out that there were a few other people in the exact same situation. But Valve wasn’t responding to our tech requests for help.

Finally, one guy reported that completely wiping his hard drive and starting over had worked. I resisted that idea since my PC was so new. How could there be anything wrong with my computer, so new and with zero issues with any other game I had? That was stupid, it had to be Valve’s fault.

Eventually I caved in and did it. And Half-Life 2 ran perfectly after that.

So who’s fault was it? Valve’s? Should I have sworn off their games forever because they didn’t fix my bug? Or was it a problem at my end that, however unlikely, had affected only that specific game?

I’m not expecting any of you to change your view. You’re going to blame Bethesda no matter what anyone else says.

1632

That’s a great story, but as others have already said, wiping the HD and going to a clean install of everything did not, in fact, clear up the issue for most people.

1633

If you’re sure your machine isn’t overheating, everything is plugged in tight and so on, it may be driver related.

If you haven’t tried already, get a driver manager from somewhere, and remove and update every last driver on your machine. Don’t skip getting a driver manager. If you don’t use one, chances are extremely good you’ll miss something. Probably something you’ve never known existed, never updated, and which is now somehow causing problems.

I don’t know that it will fix your micro stuttering, but I know from experience that it can be a solution.

Good luck.

EDIT: I assume you have tried forcing VSync off through your video driver, right? Otherwise chances are really good that’s your problem.

1634

My point was not that wiping your hard drive is always the solution, just that these PCs are ridiculously complicated and it’s hard to know where the problem lies when a specfic game is having problems that are not being experienced by more than a small segment of the users. Sometimes the problem is at the users end.

1635

No one is arguing that sometimes it’s not the games fault.

We’re all telling this isn’t one of those times. There’s too many of us with similar problems and no solutions.

Is that simple enough for you?

1636

Can you quantify “too many”? How does that compare to the total number of PC buyers? What is a significant number of users to worry about a year after release?

It’s easy to think that because of action on a message board somewhere that there are “tons of people having the problem, why won’t the developers fix it?” We all know that message boards don’t reflect the user base.

1637

Oh…you’ve done extensive research on the problems and compiled numbers. That’s my bad, I thought after spending hours googling and reading people problems and potential solutions on MANY different sites I had some idea of what was happening.

Thank you for showing me the error of my ways. Now I realize it’s all been my fault. Because every other game I have also crashes constantly. And when I try to run Fallout 3 I actually poor water on my 260 to keep it cool. Not a water cooling system, I just spritz some water on there.

All of these months and all of those hours of work. And I could have just been playing if you had just been around to show me the light.

THANK YOU SARKUS.*

*In case you can’t tell in text, that’s sarcasm. This next spot isn’t. Shut up you dummy. You’re arguing out of your ass. You don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about. You haven’t done any research at all, you’ve decided in your own head that we’re wrong already. Great. Now shut up.

1638

Look up, because that point just sailed right over your head . . .

1639

My bad. I didn’t realize you had all the hard date to back up your position. After all, you’ve spent some time googling and on some other boards.

I’ll be sure the watch the progress of your class action lawsuit against Bethesda. I mean, there are so many of you still having problems that I assume there is one, right?

1640

Did you wake up dumb this week/year/decade?

Or more pointedly, how fucking bored are you. I assume this isn’t your first time being so bored/dumb you troll people minding their own business, but I know it’s your last one I’ll be replying to.