Rogue Keeper on 28/11/2008 at 09:35

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After I explored locations in southern half of the map and got bored by lack of quests, at level 11 I decided to move on with the main quest and got hired by Three Dog as his errand boy.

As I was fighting through seemingly endless chain of underground tunnels and metros, blowing heads of many feral ghouls, raiders and mutants, I had pretty much the same feelings like you guys have described above. I tried to follow the map markers but it was useless, I got lost and tried to progress south on my own and eventually I found Museum of Technology. I had to sneak past all thouse supermutants near the Monument at night, because I had pretty much wasted my supplies of stimpaks... and didn't I kill enough vermin on my way there already?

It looks to me like the destroyed Washington is a total maze, both underground and on ground level.

I have mixed feelings from this. It's neat I can explore such detailed world, but then it's veeerrryyyy tedious to fight so long and explore hundreds of generic looking stashes, finding hundreds of generic items.

But I discovered something interesting in this game, which doesn't happen often to me in RPGs. At times I find myself lost! Surely I have some map (not very detailed) but it's not very useful in DC ruins. Many locations are interconnected and for a while I was running in circles. And strangely, it somehow feels good to feel lost in a game world. Suddenly I felt like my character has life of his own, chooses his path differently. At this point I can appreciate the open-ended nature of sandbox RPGs like this. But at the same time I felt terrified by the size of the world - damn, how long it takes me to explore it completely? I have some other games to play! I'd love to explore - only if the environments were more diverse and unique. Why can't I meet a single interesting friendly NPC during my two days long exploration of Washington ruins?

To sum it up, exploration feels good but at the same time it's terribly repetitive. It's good that after a boring episode of exploration I finally manage to find an interesting location with something to read, somebody to talk to, some quest to take, but they seem to be so far between and getting to them through hordes of hostiles and generic environments is a chore.

There's been said enough about primitivized character development system too. Normal RPGs reward you for making your character a specialist. This one seems to push you to make a generic know-it-all supercharacter. Plenty of opportunities to raise basic stats and skills, all perks are rewarding but none have negative downside like traits in F1-2 and their prerequisites are generally low. It's very likely you can end the game with stats like 9-7-8-10-9-8 and most skills similarly high.

I'm used to tighter narrative than this, I appreciate a world to explore and sidequests, but at the same time I need stronger, more urgent narrative (and better writing) to drive me on. F3 still holds my attention, it interests me more than Oblivion, but for how long it keeps me interested I can't tell yet.

PeeperStorm on 29/11/2008 at 04:51

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I just noticed that there's a sniper over the gate to Megaton. How does he get up there?

Now that I think about it, I like the idea of the GNR station even more because it provides a justification for NPC reactions being modified by your karma rating. There's a dj blabbing about all the stuff that you do, so it's natural that everyone will know about it.

Thanks to Jason Moyer for telling me how to turn the radio off. Now that I've done so, I can listen to the background music, which is very nice. With a tiny bit experimentation I've discovered that the PC version of F3 inherits one of the features of Oblivion that is completely Made Of Win: You can add your own mp3s to the soundtrack by dropping them into the various Data/Music subfolders, and the game will automagically use them. Want your battle music to include "Let's Have a War", "2 Minutes to Midnight" or "Another One Bites the Dust"? Go for it. You can also remove the existing music if you want.

I really wish that the buy/sell interface included the ability to sort by weight, type and price. Or is that another feature that I just haven't figured out yet?

There's a lot of justice in the accusations of copy/paste design here. I think a big part of the problem is that, as in Oblivion, interior spaces frequently come as pre-defined models of complete "rooms". Contrast with Morrowind where interior spaces are assembled from much smaller "wall/floor/ceiling" models, allowing for much greater variety. Oh sure, the new spaces have higher poly counts and are beautifully detailed, but you end up looking at differently furnished variations on the same set of spaces over and over.

Jason Moyer on 29/11/2008 at 18:36

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The notes section definitely needs cleaned up some. It would be nice if they were organized somehow, i.e. all of the schematics are grouped together, all of the audio logs from a specific location are grouped together and in order, etc.

I also don't like how audio logs expire sometimes, if they're quest related.

june gloom on 30/11/2008 at 05:34

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Got my copy months ago, and am now (finally) installing it.

Seems to be stuck on installing Live at the moment. Hooray.

PeeperStorm on 30/11/2008 at 18:03

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Yes, three cheers for non-optional Microsoft software that you probably won't use!

I'm beginning to suspect that a character's Luck plays a big part in determining what random encounters you hit. My new low-ish Luck character attracts Talon mercenaries like a magnet. Incidentally, Deputy Weld apparently doesn't recognize the Talons as being bad guys.

A little mystery: While wandering around near Big Town I saw a tiny human form being flung through the air way, way up high and far off in the distance. All I can think of is that it's the result of someone encountering a mutant with a Fat Man over there somewhere, far enough away that I couldn't even hear the explosion.

Speaking of things in the air, it's a nice touch that communities and other "interesting" places tend to have birds circling overhead. Make's 'em easier to find too.