my point is that Lamplight is just systematic of Bethesda’s Rule of Cool Design methodology
Fallout 4… cannot wait! I loved the story much better than New Vegas. NV didn’t draw me in like the vault dweller stuff.
I’m sure Fallout 4 will be totally worth it, Bethesda knows what they’re doing! But I still put FNV on a whole level above F3 (and even Oblivion/Skyrim).
I really hope Obsidian gets to work on an ELDER SCROLLS game instead of another fallout. I’d love to see a more ‘complex’ character driven ES game. But looks like the South Park and Project Eternity game are the immediate concerns for them.
Well South Park ships sometime this year and Project Eternity is not a full AAA title that will require all their resources. So in theory they could start working on something like that. But, I don’t know how good the relationship is between them and Bethesda at this point, what Obsidian has in the pipeline that we don’t know about, and whether Bethesda has any plans for allowing an Elder Scrolls spin-off (other then the MMO). My guess on the latter point is that they do not.
I am sure this is the minority opinion, but I agree. New Vegas was a great game, played a lot of hours, but to me I much preferred Fallout 3.
I’m not sure how anyone can like Fallout 3’s main quest/story. It’s one of the worst as an RPG.
And yet somehow more engaging than the one in New Vegas, perhaps because it doesn’t try to leverage the Gamebryo engine into a war scenario. Woo, that 10-man army.
I never felt engaged by Fallout3’s story.
It was typical Bethesda “help these people” story where you’re not so much the protagonist as a person who helps Group X do whatever it is they need to do. The story options in NV are amazing. Bitching about one small part of the game is missing the forest for the trees.
I’m sure they were ecstatic about the 85 metascore leak, and the resulting press from it
I liked the whole father/son part of the Fallout 3 storyline. Definitely the most intimate Fallout story, which I appreciated. Also, as shipped, I like how the game began with your birth and ended with your death. It was the story of a life.
I didn’t have a problem with the FO3 main story, except for the original ending which was stupid. They fixed that in the broken steel DLC. I had a lot of fun with FO3 and after all, that is what really matters in a game.
I was playing the GOTY with a few mods, MMM and FWE. I only stopped because I had finished all the quests. I was killing some bandits and then though, they will only respawn. I can’t really make the world any safer or better for anyone so there was no real point in playing anymore. What these games do is make you feel you really do make a difference, although there are limits to that. I really would like to see what has happened to DC a few decades later. Did the tress get out from Harold? Is it green? Are people prospering yet?
This is my feeling as well. When the game ended, I felt it had been a good adventure, a life well lived. I did buy the GOTY edition and enjoyed my continuing adventures, including places in the original game I hadn’t found before, but I was satisfied with the game as originally released.
Yeah, man, AMAZING. You can Group X do whatever it is they need to do OR help Group Y do whatever it is they need to do. Man you can complain about a lot of things about FO3, but FO3 was the game with a real protagonist who made changes. New Vegas you were just some random dude operating on the periphery of a larger confrontation.
FO3 you saved the wasteland, in NV you picked which group of assholes owned a Dam that you never saw before the final battle.
Anyway, the “Rule of Cool” discussion is pretty good in this thread and something that definitely bothered me about both FO3 and especially New Vegas(because of the disparity between NV/NCR and outside areas) where it was much much worse.
Between FO1 and FO2 there was a big improvement, and that was cool to see. Finding the NCR and seeing those clean pre-fab buildings and all that made you feel like time has passed. But FO3 and NV were both essentially back to the FO1 level of near-total apocalypse. The issue is that if they keep going into the future eventually it’s just a sci-fi game, not a post-apoc Fallout game.
Which is why Bethesda’s decision to only go forward time-wise was such a bad idea. A Fallout 3 set in DC around the same time as Fallout 1 would not have stepped on any of the previous “canon” of the series, had they been smart about it.
I’m really happy they did it the way they did. I played Fallout 2 on and off for about 5 years. I’d play it for a while, and then real life would distract me, and then I’d start again a year later but this time make some different choices. The whole game was really great, but I didn’t get to the ending until about 5 years after I started playing it.
During the whole 5 years, whenever I’d start the game, I’d watch that fabulous intro every time. Louis Armstrong singing his heart out. The Vault opening, and the family being slaughtered by the Enclave. And when I finished it, the whole San Francisco portion and off shore Enclave portion I only did once. And I thought it was terribly disappointing. For years I’d been looking forward to finally facing the Enclave, and when I did, it was one of the biggest anti-climaxes in gaming for me at the time.
So when Fallout 3 essentially had me fight against the same enemy? And this time the climax was so much more satisfying? Hell yes, I’m happy they did it right. For me, Fallout 3 finally put the story of Fallout 2 to rest the way it should have been done. Not only did I get to fight the Enclave, this time it was EPIC. With the Brotherhood of Steel and their avatar on my side, swatting away those Osprey-like helicopter/plane things we saw in the Fallout 2 intro when they slaughtered that Vault family? Fuck yes. That was awesome. It was so cathartic.
(Also, I played Fallout 3 GOTY edition, so I never played the original ending which would have annoyed me greatly, since I had Fawkes with me, and it would have made no sense for him not to do it).
What would you guys like to see in a Fallout 4?
I wish allies could do more than just be pack mules, quest dispensers, and gun turrets. Why should I build my skills in lockpick or explosives to “win” a dialogue tree when my compatriot specializes in that sort of thing?
Speaking of pack mules, I would love to have mounts or vehicles in the game. A fast car for the Road Warrior set, a two-headed camel for a Lawrence Of Arabia-style uniting of the wasteland tribes, or an elephant to carry all the junk I find in Vault 1138.
If they do set it in Boston or Chicago, I hope the weather can be more varied than FO3 or FO:NV. If I spend more than 365 days playing in-game, I want to see some changing of the seasons. Even if the rain is black rain and the snow is radioactive.
(I played the demo for Fallout, but my Pentium 166 wasn’t up to running the full game. I played FO3 and New Vegas on the PS3, so I may have missed on mods that add exactly those things I hope show up in FO4.)
I totally agree with you guys. There were some features in New Vegas that I thought would make me like the game more, but I vastly preferred wandering the Capital Wasteland to wandering in Nevada. The sum of FO3’s parts were better, for me.
Granted, I also liked Diablo I better than Diablo II, so maybe it’s just a thing I have with the first game in a series (I’m not including FO1 or FO2, since they were totally different games from a totally different era).
There were a ton of opportunities to see the Dam before the final battle - there were a bunch of quests there and one of the best merchants.
In New Vegas you also either saved the area …
The familiar choices:
… in a way. There’s really no white hat option, but siding with the NCR was the most Fallout 3 style “good” ending you could get. You could also damn the area to tyranny and slavery by siding with The Legion, which is the most Fallout 3 style “evil” ending you could get.
BUT, the choices, unlike Fallout 3, did not end there or remained that simple:
You had two others:
You could let an enlightened technocrat, who promised a very intriguing future for humanity, rule the area from the shadows. You could also take over New Vegas for yourself and become de facto king with a Robot & Tribal army at your disposal (of course you got a nasty surprise at the end, but you didn’t know it while setting up your own play :) ).
These are more complex, and grant the player far more agency, than Fallout 3.
Personally I think Fallout worked best when it was about finding a water chip and saving your home vault. RPGs doesn’t always have to be about saving the world. Although the first Fallout went in that direction as well for the second part.
He went and flipped a switch on a McGuffin. The only good thing about the story was that it involved family, which was an interesting angle, though they really didn’t do as much as they could’ve with it.
Compared to the numerous choices of how one can end NV it doesn’t really compare. In NV I can murder every single Important Person in the world. In Fallout3 I MUST join the Brotherhood and do what they want. There isn’t even a “screw these guys I’m going Conclave” option. It was pretty much on the rails, as most Bethesda games are. Do what Story NPC X says to do, then proceed to step 2.
Skyrim started to break the mold of that a bit, so there is hope that Fallout4 will be even better, but I bet there are tons of unkillable NPCs and you end up doing what someone wants you to in the end. I prefer NV and its position of “do whatever you want”. You can’t do it all in one play through and what you do matters for the most part. When I get caught picking someones pocket in Skyrim and they attack me and I can’t kill them, it drives me nuts. Its like playing D&D with a terrible DM.
“I stab him in the face!”
“Umm… it doesn’t hurt him. He turns into a Dragon! He kills you!”
“What?! Fine I don’t stab him in the face.”
“Ok he wants you to go to the Tomb of the Lost Winds and get his ring…”
Bethesda always has a story they want to tell with set pieces that don’t change. Skyrim was so much better than Oblivion or Fallout3, but it still had its issues. The Main Quest was more or less “Do X, Do Y” with almost no choices. They even give you dialogue choices to try to not do things, but they never work out. I mean just try not being a lackey for the Blades in either game.
Then fire up NV and go shoot Mr House in the face the instant he tells you what to do.