meh I prefer the Lincoln Repeater, being 100% small arms and gained most of the accuracy boosters in game (the British robot brain thing for example) the thing can blast the head off most enemies in one or two shots and (since ive got a lot of AP boosters as well) continue to shoot off up to 3/4 heads.
Well my overall favorite is the A3-21's Plasma Rifle you get from the quest The Replicated Man, since MF Cells are easy to come by and the rifle itself can knock the head off a Deathclaw if your character build is right.
My favorite melee weapon is the Shishkebab. Cause it is so fun to cut enemies up and set them on fire at the same time.
Favorite unarmed weapon so far is the Deathclaw Gauntlet, cause it has good damage and goes right through enemy armor, which is good on Enclave Soldiers. Fvck Power Armor. Don't have Fisto yet.
hmm yh I got the other thing, for accuracy rather than the plasma weapon. But I get so many crits atm most things go down pretty quickly with the lincoln repeater and ive literally got thousands of Magnum bullets.
same, i thot it was the best melee weapon as well?
My main weapon for normal fights is the Chinese Assault Rifle, since I drown in ammo for it. For tougher fights I prefer the A3-21, or the shotgun if things get too close, and when sneaking I use Linclon's Repeater for all the 1-hit-kills (and the fact that it has 0 spread).
Oh yes, I also use the Darth Gun for larger fights to make multiple enemies slowly die and run slower.
summary is in the next post so if you dont want to read this skip to the bottom!
So, I rented this game back in October, than rented it again a couple weeks ago, ad have been playing through it since.
I've been trying really hard to like this game, but, I just can't get into it.
One thing that bothered me, and has been touched on already, is the redundancy of it all. Every enemy fits into one of two categories.
First there is the gun wielder, who's entire strategy for killing you consists of making absolutely zero effort to evade or hide from your fire, choosing to instead remain stationary in full view and absorb every round you have to offer until one of you two's health bars runs out first.
Then there's the melee enemy, who's judgment is even more pathetic, in that he/she feels that the best course of action is to not only absorb your bullets, but run in a direct line toward you, wading through your shit storm of enough fire power to take out Godzilla, and brandishing whatever mundane make-shift bludgeoning instrument they have in the hopes that your aim is just so horrible that you can't possibly use your machine gun with enough proficiency to put them down before they beat you like a slave with their rolling pin. Unfortunately for them, they're not aware that you possess V.A.T.S., which takes all of the skill fun guesswork out of manually aiming your weapon. It would be tolerable if the game didn't practically force you to use it. FPS elements exist in the game but they're fake, because they revolve around the RPG elements... when you fire your gun the game rolls dice and adds percentages behind the scenes, which is why even if your crosshairs are centered on an enemy the bullet can still miss if the enemy is far enough away.
So this is the epitome of the diversity between the creatures in the game, aside from their aesthetic appearances. Mutants, Death Claws, Raiders, miruleks etc, all perform in the same manner. To be fair any game can be generalized to such a point that all of the enemies have a specific pattern of interaction, but I think that FO3 took the worst possible length to mix it up, they just tacked on agonizing amounts of hit points to the different enemies to make them "distinctive". So in the end a mirulek differs from a Death Claw because while rapidly back peddling and emptying three clips of ammo into a mirulek is enough to put it down, back peddling and loosing eight clips of ammo is necessary to put down a death claw. Yayyyy! And of course the problem is compounded by the fact that, as stated, you end up eventually fighting a dozen of the same enemy throughout any mission ("Ha, you thought that killing two Miruleks was a pain in the ass and a half? Well go drop this beacon in that Mirulek nest which contains fifty of the ****ers (and then do it again with the giant ants, moles, super mutants, and raiders)!").
Another point of redundancy is the missions themselves... which all consist of traveling across half the map to a location, merc'ing X amount of hapless wasteland dwellers, then backtracking across half the map to report the success of your genocidal rampage. I thought that gaming had evolved beyond the Runescape-esque "go kill 20 rabbits then report back to me for XP, now go kill 20 large rabbits then report back to me for moar XP" style of questing. The base objective is veiled a little every once in awhile, with you having to go rescue someone, but regardless it's always the same. I'm not going to say that this is an objectively bad thing, some people thoroughly enjoy such concepts, but for me personally it's gotten boring really fast; to the point where I'm not even trying to kill my enemies anymore (Now I either flat out avoid them or I try to lead them into a different type of enemy and watch them duke it out).
Perhaps I'd enjoy the deceptively repetitive gameplay more if the world was more interactive, but it just strikes me as so boring. I don't know how you guys feel about the desolation of the world within the game, apparently you've all played Oblivion which is supposedly like this game (This is one of the few RPG's like it that I have played), but there is a reason why the Mad Max movies always start just as he's about to get into some shit. The time in-between adevntures is boring as hell. The environment in this game, while expansive, is repetitive. It's the same brownish orange rocks and brown water and grey ruins extending as far as the eye can see in every direction. The art design, while realistic and at times reasonably epic (like the destroyed overpasses and trains dangling off of them), it isn't really all that visually appealing, and eventually your eye starts to just blend it all together. As for the enemies, not only are they repetitive but they're instantly forgettable. The raiders all just yell the same four lines of dialogue at you, and they don't even interact amongst each other, which is extremely odd in this day and age, considering that even the lowly grunts in Halo and the endless waves of fodder Russians in Modern Warfare at least react to each other. You can blow off the head of a super mutant and his comrades won't show any sign of shock or horror. If your sneak level is high enough you can kill someone and a dude standing right next to him won't even turn around or register that a bullet just killed someone ten feet away from him. How is that immersive?
In the end it's just you, wandering through the cardboard wasteland on your UPS styled quests by yourself (for the most part), fighting card board cut out villains, which works for some people, I guess. The lack of true immersion allows you the gamer to have the freedom to run around in the sandbox and do whatever you want, which leads me to my next point...
Which is the storyline. It seems very poorly contrived, almost tacked on. The motive of the character for doing what he does makes absolutely zero sense to me. For one thing the main storyline involves you scouring the wasteland looking for your father. That's... fine, but what's your motivation then for going way the hell off the beaten path that leads to him? If I'm in Megaton and I've just found out that my father was lasts seen on his way to meet some guy in area B, why would I risk death and never seeing my father again to help random shop keeper I've never met by killing 20 moles in an area that is on the complete opposite side of the map from where my Father is? I'm not a soldier, who would have a duty to help people out in certain situations; I'm just a girl from a vault. In fact, being a girl who was born and raised in a Vault that basically followed a Neo-Socialist esque "everything belongs to everyone in Soviet Vault 101 job picks you you no pick job" concept, how would I even have a concept of black mailing people for more money or giving a shit about people I just met 10 minutes prior. I know that it's just a video game and a certain level of suspension of disbelief is recommended, but plot holes like that erk me, and it's the reason why I personally prefer more story driven and linear games. The missions and interactions with characters tend to be a little bit more fleshed out and logical. In this it's like, "Hi, I'm Lucy West! I know you just met me five minutes ago, and I've only said two things to you, but can you go deliver this letter for me to a guy who lives 50 miles from here? Yes, there's a legion of murderous Raiders and animals on the way, no, I don't have any money, and no, if you walk away right now and pretend you never talked to me it won't actually affect your life at all. You have been living the last 20 years completely unaware of my existence after all, and you do know absolutely nothing about me! So will you do it?" And my character's just like "Her DUR.... sure!" What choice do I have? If I say no I don't get more money, I don't get weapons or even more karma. If I say yes I at least get XP. So there I am wandering through the wasteland, and the whole time I'm wondering "Why is my character doing this? From an in-universe perspective she gains nothing from doing this. Why would any sane person do this?" And thus I become detached and the immersion fails again.
/lengthy rant
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Last edited by AthenasTrgrFngr on Mar 24th, 2010 at 08:59 AM
So in the end, if I had to give a grade to it's various features.
Synopsis-
Gameplay Mechanics: 6/10. Boring, unimaginative A.I. makes the fights repetitive and lack luster. More often than not you'll end up more excited by the weapon you're using than by the actual fight itself. In addition there is nothing about the world itself that sticks out. The sheer diversity granted by the RPG aspects of game somewhat make up for these shortcomings, however. and admittedly its awesome seeing a squad of brotherhood outcasts stomp a house full of raiders.
Story: 6/10. Unimaginative storyline, and poorly written and constructed quests give this a low grade. IMO The quests need to be reconstructed so as to be more unique (Throw some puzzles in there or something? Dunno.), engaging, and personal. The side quests would be a lot more interesting to embark on if there was a sense of urgency to them, or at least a personal stake involved. The occasional well written character with a memorable personality quirk (like Moira's disturbing haplessness) keeps this grade from being lower. Otherwise the majority of the time it seems like the only motivation your character has for doing what she does is based off of you the gamer just wanting to complete the game (which is true to an extent from an outside perspective, but that's not good for a story).
Fun Factor: N/A. Some people love this game with a passion, some don't, like me. If anything I'd say the game is at least worth a rental purely for the sake of experiencing what a true sandbox game looks like; this is the closest thing to one besides Fable imo. But aside from that, you're not missing anything. Everything about this game screams mediocrity. It's just that, there's so much mediocrity to discover that it'll keep you busy.
If you buy it for the PC you can mod the hell out of it as well, which adds to the quality.
Closing Thoughts-
I feel like the developers took as many ideas from as many games as possible, and instead of taking any one of them and fine tuning it and making it great they steam rolled all of them into one massive clump of just average quality. At the risk of sounding redundant, there is nothing in this game that stands out as above average, but there's so much stuff to get in to that time can fly by. In all honesty I probably would have rated this game higher if I hadn't been spoiled by... Mass Effect. Mass Effect and it's sequel are pretty much the standards for what any great sandbox type of game should be like. Mass Effect is not a pure sandbox game but a hybrid between story driven linearity and sandbox freedom, and that's probably why I feel that the franchise is so good, especially in comparison to this. Everything that is in Fallout, Mass Effect's done better; better shooter mechanics, better A.I., superior storyline and characters and interaction, better quests, etc. Better everything pretty much lol. Maybe by the time Fallout 4 comes around the devs will have polished the game and made it more engaging. They shouldn't focus on the scale so much as the quality itself... Borderlands failed for the exact same reason, imo.
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Last edited by AthenasTrgrFngr on Mar 24th, 2010 at 09:07 AM
For a while now Ive been hearing that this game is awesome. While I was at GameStop yesterday getting some points for the kids I noticed that it was selling for $20. I bought it. I noticed that there are a few DLC for this game. For 800 points each I doubt Ill get them anytime soon. Can anybody tell me what are they for? Extra stages maybe?
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