Caliostro said:
DirkGently said:
Please stop referencing Yahtzee. It's not funny.
First thing's first: Did Yahtzee invent any of the words I used? I'm not aware of such. It's kind of annoying to have people tell you to stop quoting such and such because at some point they said a sentence like that... Yeah, due to sheer logic there's a limit to the possible amount of combinations possible one can do with English words. You might be unoriginal enough to copy everyone else but consider that Yahtzee did not invent these expressions and they were being used BEFORE he was famous.
Now then...
DirkGently said:
Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 were far superior games and RPGs than Fallout 3, or "Call of Duty: Capital Wasteland". Due to the fact that shooting outside of VATS ruins the point of AP and the agility stat. The Van Buren, the canceled Fallout 3 that was being made Black Isle Studios before Interplay axed them, design documents called for a real time combat system; movement would no longer cost AP, however, it would stop it from regenerating. Shooting, punching, stabbing, kicking, throwing, and item using would all cost AP, a system I find to be far superior to Bethesda's VATS.
While Fallout 3 is by no means a bad game, it's a terrible Fallout game. It severely lacks the humor and style of the previous games, never mind the difficulty or that the RPG aspect is actually important to playing your character. In Fallout 3 you canmax out the three ranged combat skills, along with repair, lockpicking, science, barter and speech if you choose your perks carefully.
Also, the world of Fallout 3 is pretty damned unbelievable. Aside from how Elder Lyons completely changed the policy of the Brotherhood, and there is still plenty of dudes to have enough split from them and form their own group, none of them seem interested in manufacturing weapons, the role of the Knights, or designing new ones or improvements (the scribes), they're all interested in using them (the Paladins). There are no farms anywhere, everyone is living off TV dinners and frozen meals from two hundred fucking years ago. Think about that for a second. Everyone is living off frozen TV dinners from two hundred years ago. How the hell does that make any sense? They would all have been eaten or rotted by the time you emerge from Vault 101. Also, it's fairly easy to filter water to remove the radiation, the super mutants have no depth, and where the hell is their supply of FEV? Fallout 1 had big giant vats of the stuff that people were dipped into. If it's Vault 87, then how the hell do they get in and how come I can't? They obviously can't take people in via the vault door as it's been slagged in place, and the radiation would deep-fry anybody trying to get in that wasn't a super mutant.
Sorry to rant like that, but don't go and insult us fans of two of the greatest RPGs ever made because you don't have the patience to sit down and think through an encounter rather than just pouring bullets at enemy until his body explodes.
Also, OP, check out Project V13. It's a Fallout MMO currently in development by Interplay.
See, there's this fallacious concept a lot of gamers seem to adopt recently: Turn based = More strategy than real time. This is incorrect. Oh I'm sure there are FPS w here you can go through by holding down the fire button and walking forward, but a good real time game will require strategy. The thing is, most people who adhere to this concept won't get it because they can't do it. They're used to "turn based concept", which condescendingly stops the whole world after every attack so you can decide what to do next and not have to worry about such things as movement or aiming. In a good real time game, not only do we have to make complex strategic decisions in a split-second, we also have to consider movement AND aiming, between other factors. Our world doesn't stop for us to think about and carefully select where to shoot or what item to use. If we don't keep up, we die. We don't have to consider "AP", we have to consider shooting delay, clip capacity, damage per second vs. instant damage, bullet trajectory, etc.
Now, Fallout 3 is no means a perfect game, none is, but by jesus tits dropping "turn based" made it nothing if not incredibly better. I mean, I certainly don't see how someone who complains about incongruous details as "immersion breakers" would find turn based in any way more immersive...
That said:
- The paladins still research weapons and history, but they're also interested in helping people. Reveals a believable human side if you ask me.
- Super Mutants have depth if you bother to read through the in-game stuff. They were to be a new form of biological warfare. The perfect soldier. Unfortunately they were never perfected, only "close" specimen ever was Fawkes. Also they don't take people into Vault 87, they are a bit like a disease and can infect others by themselves (although I'll give you that this part isn't that well explained... Which is acceptable if you think about it since it's not like they have the FBI working for them... All they have is bit and pieces of pre-war info that survived). Remember Big Town? What did you think they wanted to do with the people?
- Frozen being the key word. Sure they would probably be spoiled by now, but it's not like they can afford the luxury of "better" comestibles. On the other hand, I'm sure you missed the fact they eat a LOT of "hunt". Iguana, Brahmin, Mirelurks...etc.
Regarding the Yahtzee quote; My bad, he says "Cockslapping the Mona Lisa" not "Wiping your ass with the Mona Lisa".
Firstly, I don't intend to discuss real-time versus turn-based. They've got their own pluses and negatives, and we're talking about the Fallout games, which aren't FPS, they're RPGs. The only non-RPG was Fallout: Brotherhood Of Steel, and it was terrible, and nobody really liked it. Your average FPS pretty much involves: take cover, pop out, kill somebody, pop back into cover. "Strategy" is essentially which table/rock/wall/piece of debris to hide behind until your enemy stops to reload, so you can pop him in the face, and move onto the next guy. Most real-time RPGs are the same the thing except you're hiding from dudes with bows and you're stabbing guys in the face with a sword instead of bullets. The only real-time games to heavily consider strategy are Real-time-Strategy games. You may think differently, but I'm not going to include 'reflex' strategies that you don't even think about; smashing the horde away from in L4D, torching the tank, or anything of the sort. You don't think, you just do.
Not thinking through your placement in F1 & F2 will leave you open to painful attack when it's the enemies turn; you'll take quite a bit of damage from the jerks you're fighting. In fallout 3, you can just run away, pull up your pipboy and use a stimpack or two to heal any damage. In F1 & F2, you've go to wait until it's you're turn, and then you can use stimpacks to heal.
Fallout 3 lost major points by dropping turn based combat
and failing to implement a proper combat system. Since fighting in real-time requires no AP, one need not use their agility skill at all, allowing them to ignore it and use those points into the other skills, making it easier to play the game as "Call of Duty: Post-Nuclear Warfare".
1) Paladins aren't supposed to research weapons and history; their job is to protect the other Brotherhood members and occassionally go and kill things that have the shiny pieces of technology that the Brotherhood wants. The Scribes record the technology, and design new pieces of it. The Knights manufacture the weapons designed by the scribes.
2) The Super-Mutants in F1 were the result of being dipped into the vats of FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus) that were at Mariposa Military Base. FEV was pased on the Pan Viral Immunity project, designed to make a super-vaccine to protect Americans against Chinese Bio-weapons. Soon the government realised that this could be used to make their own super-soldiers and began experiments on people and animals, to create a new human. Hence it was called the Forced Evolutionary Virus. The soldiers stationed here eventually became the Brotherhood of Steel, and the scientists were executed and the soldiers left for a nearby bunker with their families. Soon thereafter, an expedition looking for technology containing Harold, the only character to be in all three Fallout games, and Richard Grey, who would later become the Master, went there. Richard Grey got knocked into a vat, and Harold was knocked unconscious and exposed to it somehow as well, leading to his mutated state.
Richard Grey awakens later and soon becomes the Master, with his plan to dip all of humanity into the vats so that they can become part of the Unity, and be a better humanity than the one that destroyed the world. The super-mutants in F1 are organized, and working together, using radios, occupying cities, and abducting merchant caravans to be dipped. The Master soon learns that few people are turning into intelligent super mutants like his Lieutenant, and determines that radioactive fallout has mutated people ever so slightly and that this has caused the FEV to work improperly, and he sets out to find a Vault of people who would be untouched by the radiation, and who would mutate into intelligent super mutants. His plans are cut short when you either sneakily rig his nuke to go, boom, convince him that since his mutants are sterile, he'll fail and he should kill himself, or kill him yourself, whereupon he'll activate the nuke.
The super-mutants in F3 come from Vault 87, where there was FEV, and scientists working to create a super soldier or bio weapon they could deploy via air drops into China, and then let them go crazy, and then release a chemical that would kill them. They walk around the Capital Wasteland, killing people for food and somehow to turn them into Super Mutants, getting them into Vault 87 somehow, which, yes, is where they come from, because that's what the Lone Wanderer tells Elder Lyons after you get back from Raven Rock, that the Super Mutants are coming from Vault 87. You get 100 XP and some good Karma for doing so.
3) It's still fucking bullshit. There is no-way that they'd still be able to eat properly and have there be so goddamned many of the various creatures left around. Never mind that they're diet is in no-way decent, and I doubt a three meals of mirelurk, iguana and mole-rat are enough to feed you properly throughout the day There's no farming at all, and pretty much every town had a farm in F1 & F2. Likewise, it wasn't a lack of clean water in F1 & F2, it was a lack of water period. Also, frozen is not the key word. They would have defrosted, oh, I dunno, shortly after the bombs went off because the fridges would have stopped working because of a major lack of power. That's another issue; where the hell do they get their power? Also, why do all the cars make mushroom clouds when they explode? The whole was over oil, remember? Like wise, the T-51b armor wasn't ever used in Anchorage. I suppose that's what that terminal was talking about the scenario being wrong, but the T-51b was supposed to have been released just before the bombs were dropped.
