Uh, I don't know about that. The game has only a whopping 17 sidequests. It's tiny. Oblivion and Morrowind were nice because of everything the player could do outside of the main story arc. (Oblivion had 20+ quests per faction and many additional side quests.) It took me only one week (playing after homework and other obligations) to visit every map location and do just about everything in FO3. At this point the only fun thing left for me to do is wander the map collecting people's fingers. (And why do shots to the face always cleanly sever heads at the neck?)
Oh, I've also seen several instances of quest NPCs killing themselves by falling off balconies, broken dialog where NPCs don't know the status of other NPCs, and triggers that reset. (I made Tenpenny Tower a ghoul playground, but now its ghoul and human tenants are missing and the visual changes in the tower are reset.)
That's saying nothing of the epic ending that is completely out of line with the other games, and the fact that you can have a radiation-proof companion who could complete the final fatal mission for you, but refuses because "it is your destiny" to sacrifice yourself. What's up with that? I feel sorry for the original Fallout creator who said he felt like "our ex wife had sold our children that she had legal custody of," regarding FO3's development.
You spent a whole paragraph comparing Fallout 3 to Morrowind and Oblivion. Why? It's to Bethesda's credit that they kept to the Fallout heritage instead of just doing their own thing. The Fallout games were meant to be open-ended, not huge. In Fallout 2, you could get every major location placed on your map within a couple of hours, and the quests within didn't take long to complete. Fallout 1 was even smaller.
Your second paragraph boils down to "Fallout 3 has bugs." What game doesn't? In Morrowind, you could trivially make yourself invincible with alchemy. Oh, and you could make a 1 mana spell that instantly recharged all of your mana. All things considered, the bugs in Fallout 3 aren't that bad.
Yes, the ending sucked. But at least the story up to that point was interesting. Like, I kept going with the main quest because I actually wanted to see what happened. None of the Fallout or Elder Scrolls games so far had a story where I gave a shit; in fact, I never even finished Morrowind or Oblivion for that precise reason.
Saying "there are only 17 side quests" is misleading. First, that only counts the quests that appear in your journal, and there are quite a few that don't. Second, the quests tend to be really involved. Think about all of the steps involved in the "Deliver a message for Lucy West" quest, for instance. I'd much rather have 15 quests like that than 45 "go to X kill Y give Z to A" quests.
And anyway, how big do you need your game to be? I finished it in 35 hours, ignoring about a third of the quests (judging by the Achievements I didn't get). I'm guessing it took your obsessive ass close to 50. Is this really not big enough for a game? I think it's more than acceptable considering, again, that Fallout 2 was roughly the same size, probably even a bit smaller.
I shouldn't judge your experiences, of course, but it seems to me like the only hard criticisms you have are the bugs and the crappy ending. What about the incredible atmosphere? The gunfights? The VATS system (which even you must admit is awesome)? The solid voice acting? The fact that Repair and Science are actually useful? The streamlined character system in general? I'm sure you recall the Radioactive Panda comic about Spielberg making Star Wars movies. I think you're overlooking a lot of things that Bethesda did right.
The "the incredible atmosphere" lasted until you set out from Megaton. Megaton was immersive. The vault was at least interesting. It felt like the gave their all putting an "oomph" into the beginning of the game. But go elsewhere and you find two or three sublocations per setting. Megaton and Rivet City are the only two fleshed-out locales and neither is as detailed as any city from Oblivion. The rest of the locations are sort of... blah.
I think you're the one making an unfair comparison to past games. Fallout 1 and 2 were both out before the widespread introduction DVDs. Even Oblivion was a disappointing step back from the size of Morrowind. I expected at least Oblivion-level questions and locations. 50 hours might be a decent main quest length. I would've liked to see a longer (and less linear) plot. (As in the first two games, where you had to search different locations and puzzle out who the bad guys were instead of being led around by the nose.)
And the claim that they "kept to the Fallout heritage"? You can't even kill kids! I was a good character, but I wanted to waste the Little Lamplight kids so bad! You can't honestly tell me that you didn't want to as well.
Losing the ability to kill kids wasn't Bethesda's fault. It's a different market now than it was ten years ago. If they had put child-killing into the game, they'd have had to spend all their profits fighting legal battles. Blame the liberal media for that one.
I'll agree that the main quest was better in Fallout 1 and 2, but conversely, the side quests were mostly worse. Indeed, the side quests in Fallout 3 require a fair bit of "puzzling out" (especially if you turn off the map marker), while this was rarely so in the original games.
My comparison to earlier games is perfectly fair. It's completely incongruous to argue that Bethesda should have kept true to the Fallout heritage, and also that they should have made Fallout 3 100+ hours long. DVD's or not, the previous Fallout games were nowhere near that length. Your argument screams double standard: you criticize the game both for being like Fallout and for not being like Fallout. So which is it?
The fact of the matter is that Hugeness was never part of Fallout, and this has nothing to do with the absence of DVD's. Baldur's Gate came out around the same time as Fallout 2, and it used multiple CD's to make the game extremely long.
I think the atmosphere is terrific because everywhere you go, you see the ruins of a broken world. You're taking for granted just how detailed every inch of the environment is. I'd rather have moderately detailed cities and fleshed-out everything-else than Oblivion's detailed cities engulfed in miles of BLAH the moment you set foot outside them. In Fallout 3, I actually enjoyed traveling to each location for the first time. In both Oblivion and Morrowind, this was a chore, and I gladly used their respective fast-travel options to avoid doing so.
"Your argument screams double standard: you criticize the game both for being like Fallout and for not being like Fallout. So which is it?"
Oh, it's both. I won't lie, I liked Morrowind more than either Fallout 1 or 2. What I wanted to see from Bethesda was a game that was structurally Elder Scrolls (i.e., a construct I could explore (and complete side quests in) for at least a month real-time) but stylistically Fallout (harassing drunken preachers, making horribly racist jokes about ghouls (not just calling them ‘stinkin’ zombies’), picking fruit from a tree growing off my head, earning the Childkiller reputation, choosing perks that actually had some negative consequences…). And how about some factions to join? Those were in both series.
Lots of hardcore Fallout fans were whining about “Oblivion with guns” before FO3 came out. That sounded fine to me, so long as they brought the best of both games. I’m of the opinion that they discarded the best either had to offer.
"What I wanted to see from Bethesda was a game that was structurally Elder Scrolls (i.e., a construct I could explore (and complete side quests in) for at least a month real-time) but stylistically Fallout."
Well, Christ, Jim, that's a tall order! For a guy whose motto was always, "Have low expectations so you won't be disappointed," you're judging the game by standards set somewhere between Alpha Centauri and Mount Olympus. Making a game the size of Morrowind with the same level of detail as Fallout? That might be more content than you'd get in an MMO. You said you wanted "the best of both games," but that's just not possible -- it would have taken them ten years to make that much content.
I also think you're not considering the effect that your skill as a player has on game length. When I first played Morrowind, it lasted my entire summer vacation -- no small feat considering what a video-game obsessed freak I was. I replayed it a while back and it barely lasted a couple of weeks. A lot of the time in that first run-through was spent dying, reloading, dicking around in my inventory, and just generally trying to figure out how shit worked. With Fallout 3, there's none of that for either of us -- we know the system already (because it's Fallout), and the Bethesda style of open-endedness is extremely familiar to us. I'd bet good money that Fallout 3 would have taken you the better part of a month if you'd never seen Morrowind or SPECIAL before.
You completely misinterpreted what I wrote. I wanted Elder Scrolls size coupled with an Elder Scrolls level of detail. What I wanted from Fallout was the setting, NPCs, tone of the game (like I said in my previous post, the style). This game is smaller than even Oblivion (which was smaller than Morrowind) and had less nooks and crannies to explore than either. And they sold out to the PC police so that it could go to consoles without much controversy; they compromised on the Fallout "feel" of the game (VATS doesn't even offer a crotch shot for god's sake).
Playing through all the quests and exploring all of the areas in (relatively tiny) Oblivion took me two or three weeks. FO3 took me less than a week, and gaming came after homework and labwork. I don't buy your argument from experience. Game time correlates with experience, sure, but it also scales with content. This took me far less time than similar games I've played. There just wasn't enough to do.
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Uh, I don't know about that. The game has only a whopping 17 sidequests. It's tiny. Oblivion and Morrowind were nice because of everything the player could do outside of the main story arc. (Oblivion had 20+ quests per faction and many additional side quests.) It took me only one week (playing after homework and other obligations) to visit every map location and do just about everything in FO3. At this point the only fun thing left for me to do is wander the map collecting people's fingers. (And why do shots to the face always cleanly sever heads at the neck?)
Oh, I've also seen several instances of quest NPCs killing themselves by falling off balconies, broken dialog where NPCs don't know the status of other NPCs, and triggers that reset. (I made Tenpenny Tower a ghoul playground, but now its ghoul and human tenants are missing and the visual changes in the tower are reset.)
That's saying nothing of the epic ending that is completely out of line with the other games, and the fact that you can have a radiation-proof companion who could complete the final fatal mission for you, but refuses because "it is your destiny" to sacrifice yourself. What's up with that? I feel sorry for the original Fallout creator who said he felt like "our ex wife had sold our children that she had legal custody of," regarding FO3's development.
You spent a whole paragraph comparing Fallout 3 to Morrowind and Oblivion. Why? It's to Bethesda's credit that they kept to the Fallout heritage instead of just doing their own thing. The Fallout games were meant to be open-ended, not huge. In Fallout 2, you could get every major location placed on your map within a couple of hours, and the quests within didn't take long to complete. Fallout 1 was even smaller.
Your second paragraph boils down to "Fallout 3 has bugs." What game doesn't? In Morrowind, you could trivially make yourself invincible with alchemy. Oh, and you could make a 1 mana spell that instantly recharged all of your mana. All things considered, the bugs in Fallout 3 aren't that bad.
Yes, the ending sucked. But at least the story up to that point was interesting. Like, I kept going with the main quest because I actually wanted to see what happened. None of the Fallout or Elder Scrolls games so far had a story where I gave a shit; in fact, I never even finished Morrowind or Oblivion for that precise reason.
Saying "there are only 17 side quests" is misleading. First, that only counts the quests that appear in your journal, and there are quite a few that don't. Second, the quests tend to be really involved. Think about all of the steps involved in the "Deliver a message for Lucy West" quest, for instance. I'd much rather have 15 quests like that than 45 "go to X kill Y give Z to A" quests.
And anyway, how big do you need your game to be? I finished it in 35 hours, ignoring about a third of the quests (judging by the Achievements I didn't get). I'm guessing it took your obsessive ass close to 50. Is this really not big enough for a game? I think it's more than acceptable considering, again, that Fallout 2 was roughly the same size, probably even a bit smaller.
I shouldn't judge your experiences, of course, but it seems to me like the only hard criticisms you have are the bugs and the crappy ending. What about the incredible atmosphere? The gunfights? The VATS system (which even you must admit is awesome)? The solid voice acting? The fact that Repair and Science are actually useful? The streamlined character system in general? I'm sure you recall the Radioactive Panda comic about Spielberg making Star Wars movies. I think you're overlooking a lot of things that Bethesda did right.
The "the incredible atmosphere" lasted until you set out from Megaton. Megaton was immersive. The vault was at least interesting. It felt like the gave their all putting an "oomph" into the beginning of the game. But go elsewhere and you find two or three sublocations per setting. Megaton and Rivet City are the only two fleshed-out locales and neither is as detailed as any city from Oblivion. The rest of the locations are sort of... blah.
I think you're the one making an unfair comparison to past games. Fallout 1 and 2 were both out before the widespread introduction DVDs. Even Oblivion was a disappointing step back from the size of Morrowind. I expected at least Oblivion-level questions and locations. 50 hours might be a decent main quest length. I would've liked to see a longer (and less linear) plot. (As in the first two games, where you had to search different locations and puzzle out who the bad guys were instead of being led around by the nose.)
And the claim that they "kept to the Fallout heritage"? You can't even kill kids! I was a good character, but I wanted to waste the Little Lamplight kids so bad! You can't honestly tell me that you didn't want to as well.
At least Harold made an appearance.
Losing the ability to kill kids wasn't Bethesda's fault. It's a different market now than it was ten years ago. If they had put child-killing into the game, they'd have had to spend all their profits fighting legal battles. Blame the liberal media for that one.
I'll agree that the main quest was better in Fallout 1 and 2, but conversely, the side quests were mostly worse. Indeed, the side quests in Fallout 3 require a fair bit of "puzzling out" (especially if you turn off the map marker), while this was rarely so in the original games.
My comparison to earlier games is perfectly fair. It's completely incongruous to argue that Bethesda should have kept true to the Fallout heritage, and also that they should have made Fallout 3 100+ hours long. DVD's or not, the previous Fallout games were nowhere near that length. Your argument screams double standard: you criticize the game both for being like Fallout and for not being like Fallout. So which is it?
The fact of the matter is that Hugeness was never part of Fallout, and this has nothing to do with the absence of DVD's. Baldur's Gate came out around the same time as Fallout 2, and it used multiple CD's to make the game extremely long.
I think the atmosphere is terrific because everywhere you go, you see the ruins of a broken world. You're taking for granted just how detailed every inch of the environment is. I'd rather have moderately detailed cities and fleshed-out everything-else than Oblivion's detailed cities engulfed in miles of BLAH the moment you set foot outside them. In Fallout 3, I actually enjoyed traveling to each location for the first time. In both Oblivion and Morrowind, this was a chore, and I gladly used their respective fast-travel options to avoid doing so.
"Your argument screams double standard: you criticize the game both for being like Fallout and for not being like Fallout. So which is it?"
Oh, it's both. I won't lie, I liked Morrowind more than either Fallout 1 or 2. What I wanted to see from Bethesda was a game that was structurally Elder Scrolls (i.e., a construct I could explore (and complete side quests in) for at least a month real-time) but stylistically Fallout (harassing drunken preachers, making horribly racist jokes about ghouls (not just calling them ‘stinkin’ zombies’), picking fruit from a tree growing off my head, earning the Childkiller reputation, choosing perks that actually had some negative consequences…). And how about some factions to join? Those were in both series.
Lots of hardcore Fallout fans were whining about “Oblivion with guns” before FO3 came out. That sounded fine to me, so long as they brought the best of both games. I’m of the opinion that they discarded the best either had to offer.
"What I wanted to see from Bethesda was a game that was structurally Elder Scrolls (i.e., a construct I could explore (and complete side quests in) for at least a month real-time) but stylistically Fallout."
Well, Christ, Jim, that's a tall order! For a guy whose motto was always, "Have low expectations so you won't be disappointed," you're judging the game by standards set somewhere between Alpha Centauri and Mount Olympus. Making a game the size of Morrowind with the same level of detail as Fallout? That might be more content than you'd get in an MMO. You said you wanted "the best of both games," but that's just not possible -- it would have taken them ten years to make that much content.
I also think you're not considering the effect that your skill as a player has on game length. When I first played Morrowind, it lasted my entire summer vacation -- no small feat considering what a video-game obsessed freak I was. I replayed it a while back and it barely lasted a couple of weeks. A lot of the time in that first run-through was spent dying, reloading, dicking around in my inventory, and just generally trying to figure out how shit worked. With Fallout 3, there's none of that for either of us -- we know the system already (because it's Fallout), and the Bethesda style of open-endedness is extremely familiar to us. I'd bet good money that Fallout 3 would have taken you the better part of a month if you'd never seen Morrowind or SPECIAL before.
You completely misinterpreted what I wrote. I wanted Elder Scrolls size coupled with an Elder Scrolls level of detail. What I wanted from Fallout was the setting, NPCs, tone of the game (like I said in my previous post, the style). This game is smaller than even Oblivion (which was smaller than Morrowind) and had less nooks and crannies to explore than either. And they sold out to the PC police so that it could go to consoles without much controversy; they compromised on the Fallout "feel" of the game (VATS doesn't even offer a crotch shot for god's sake).
Playing through all the quests and exploring all of the areas in (relatively tiny) Oblivion took me two or three weeks. FO3 took me less than a week, and gaming came after homework and labwork. I don't buy your argument from experience. Game time correlates with experience, sure, but it also scales with content. This took me far less time than similar games I've played. There just wasn't enough to do.
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