Gasoline-powered cars also don’t explode if you shoot them a lot. It’s for the sake of fun, and that’s fine by me.
Diesel ones don’t explode either, if I remember correctly, so then big trucks and such shouldn’t explode unless they have a massive fuel leak in the injection system inside the engine while it is running (IIRC).
Also, I’m a fan of fun. Lightsabers don’t make any sense in our knowledge of physics but they are fun. So who cares if it is leaning towards the “magic” or “fantastic” side of science-fiction. By the same token I don’t really care that laser guns aren’t practical or realistic.
Right I suppose I should have been thinking more of the make-shift side rather than using the whole wood-chipper. If the wood-chipper is deconstructed into an engine and a belt delivery and ejection system, removing the grinding stuff (not sure if it’s even possible realistically, but who cares) then I suppose it would work.
The whole thing kinda reminds me more of how the gadgeteer class in Wizardry 8 makes things rather than say finding random pieces in Bioshock and cobbling them into your weapon upgrades.
Speaking on this topic, I really want to see the fire-sword item in Fallout 3 now.
You don’t take pills to suddenly make you radiation resistant or use some IV (or whatever rad-away is) to purge some radiation from your system.
Do I even need to mention a laser minigun? A minigun that fires bloody laser beams…
Zylon
3045
When someone smashes you in the face with an oversize spring-loaded hammer, you don’t slide 50 feet over rough terrain and then stand up again.
Amazingly, there is not a suitcase sized kit that can restore fertile life to barren, irradiated land.
I think we get the idea …
While there’s plenty of stretches of fiction to be expected, we all realize that there is a degree of ‘realism’ we are ready to accept. The line is subjective, and different for each of us. That’s where it becomes tough, of course.
While it might be cute as a one-liner, I doubt many of us want to see a magical scepter in Fallout 3 that turns super mutants into sparkly unicorns - because of fusion.
Or am I way off on that?
So, which is more out there, a suitcase that can restore barren land or a nuclear catapult?
Does a nuclear catapult look out of place when put next to a minigun that shoots laser beams?
Should we even be debating this? They’re all in the same ballpark in their lack of realism.
PeterK
3049
Only if there is a candy mountain involved.
I agree, the line is subjective. The nuke launcher bothers me a little but the teddy bear launcher doesn’t. Not sure why. At any rate, it’s not a game-breaker by any means.
@usedpilot (Edit: need to make better use of the quote feature when typing longer items)
Well, that’s subjective, unfortunately. We’re each going to be determining that individually. Locked in our heads are particular issues and preferences that make us more inclined to accept one falsity, and less so another. That’s a balance they’ll hopefully strike.
I think more important are the internal consistencies. How do these bombs not create the same radiation that apparently is a huge threat in the wasteland? Or do they? I’m actually pretty ignorant of these apart from seeing them employed in the demonstration.
Also, there’s an awesome picture in that computerandvideogames review above - the one with the Bob’s Big Boy-ish thing in the background.
Interestingly, I’m the opposite. But only to the extent that I’d like to see the teddy bear launcher as marginally effective, rather than removed or anything.
Apart from that, if you receive a fatal dose of radiation out in the wastelands, I should hope you are instantly transported to the secret Candy Mountain level.
The nuke launcher doesn’t bother me one bit, it’s fun and goofy and in the spirit of fallout, alien weapons and gatling lasers and so on. What does bother me is their missing stuff like the origin of the deathclaws, saying they were evolved from bears or something rather than chameleons. What appears to be a very minor continuity mistake really got my goat, because I played the previous games and I know damn well they didn’t evolve from bears. You need to be careful about that stuff when developing a sequel to someone else’s game. Fallout isn’t Star Trek; there’s not a whole lot of canon to absorb and obey, but when you break it players will notice.
You guys know that it launches other stuff besides teddy bears, right? Like, heavy and pointy things?
Pretty sure the item’s weight determines damage, and that the only reason it was doing so much in the demos was because he was cheating.
Squee
3056
From what I heard, that was just written by one previewer, who Emil later said was wrong.
And you guys are missing one of the weirder parts of Fallout 3 that still manages to stick in my craw, the toilet water. Drinking water that’s somehow been in a toilet for 200 years and just getting radiation just makes me twitch. I’m still hoping that’s something that they mentioned in the past and it’ll get cut, because damn. Unless there’s still running water, in which case it gets even weirder.
Edit: Ah, here we go. http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=855939&st=160 Where he says deathclaws aren’t bears.
Zylon
3057
I’d like to know how civilization hasn’t managed to completely rebuild itself in TWO HUNDRED YEARS. Especially the super-science civilization depicted therein.
Squee
3058
I think it mostly has on the west coast. IIRC depending on what you did in Fallout 2, NCR pretty much takes over the whole area.
Because they were bombed back into the Stone Age, and it takes more than 200 years to advance back to a “super science civilization” :)
In fact they’d be worse off after the bombing because most modern people that survived, as few as they would be, would be totally lacking survival skills, they just wouldn’t have the knowledge necessary to survive.
