Fallout: great game after bad first impression

[Azrael the cat]

You take that back right now!

Alright alright, I take it back! They're clearly driving over the speed limit at the start, and then they appear to park in a loading zone. Very bad respect for traffic laws. Around the 2 minute mark they're in clear breach of council zoning regulations, as they're obviously conducting some sort of high-volume rock performance in an area clearly designated for commercial office space. They do seem to be attempting to violate council noise restrictions, but it's during the daytime, so noise restrictions aren't in place for hours yet - but intent is the key component of criminality, so that doesn't excuse them from being criminal scum. Rob Halford is definitely not wearing a seatbelt when they take off at the end, and they didn't even pay for parking. The scoundrels!!!

 

[pippin]

FO1 does not have a shit start. You're sent out into the world with a gun and an objective.

No, you either kill, sneak or run past 20 or so rats in a linear corridor that serves no purpose (i.e. the 'start'). Then you're sent out into the world with a gun and an objective. If you counter-intuitively turn straight around and return to the vault, you get a background/motivation/filling out of your objective that you should have got at the start. Instead of a corridor with 20 rats.

The opening cutscene is quite clear on what you have to do and why, though.

 

[GlutenBurger]

Yeah, but the opening scene doesn't provide sufficient motivation for the player. There should have been a prologue in which you play through your character's life in the vault, culminating with your mother being brutally slaughtered by your pet rat.

 

[pippin]

Yeah, but the opening scene doesn't provide sufficient motivation for the player. There should have been a prologue in which you play through your character's life in the vault, culminating with your mother being brutally slaughtered by your pet rat.

Well in FO3 the bully's mom is about to be killed by a roach. Clearly Bethesda fixed Fallout in many ways.

 

[Master]

Just saying, I do like a bit of Judas Priest, but you can't seriously put them on the same plane as Bruce Dickenson-fronted Iron Maiden

And that's without taking into account that the guy's a 4-point polymath (music, fencing, airline pilot/mechanic and author), in an era where even 3-point polymaths are incredibly rare. And a genuine one too, not just a guy with one mastery who dabbles in a few hobbies - he was a world-class (top 50 ranked) fencer, and flies/repairs commercial 707 passenger jets (i.e. highest level you can be as a commercial pilot). I don't doubt that his book sales piggybacked a fair bit on his musical rep, but you could swap that one out with broadcasting and businessman.

Whats Bruce Dickinson doing all those other things have to do with whos the better singer? Broadcasting and businessman... What? Hes good but he has NOTHING on Hallford. Dont get me wrong i like some Maiden. What really kills them though is the lack of songs featuring the word "vaporize" on em... To my knowledge they have none.

Also Priest has so many post apocalyptic songs. Metal Gods. Blood red skies, The Sentinel, almost the entirety of Painkiller, with my favorite being


Small guns! Small guns blazing!


Also The Cathedral Spires from the Juggulator. This is like the Children of the Cathedral hymn


Part of the chorus even sounds like its being sang by Super Mutants, when it says "in CUTHEDRUL spires"

Also when it says the second time

"Time to rise up and conspire
In cathedral spires"

To conspire in a cathedral, hmmm...

That cant be a coincidence.

Theres also in The Sentinel yet another mention of a ruined cathedral in some nuke blasted city...

Really ive never seen anyone but Priest and Fallout combine a cathedral and nuclear war. Theres Canticle for Leibowitz but there its a monastery not a a cathedral.


. . . . .


OT

20 rats? Really man, 20 rats? Theres exactly FOUR or sometimes FIVE rats that you have to fight to the exit.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I entirely agree with the premise of the thread title, sorry Excidium II . Right off the bat, I'm not a big fan of RPGs with guns and I'm not fussed about post-apoc settings, so the game had to grab me and grab me quick. Unfortunately the start had me dropping off. Literally, I'd nodded off when I finally quit, but, before that, I did the rats.

After spending a good few hours examining every aspect of the character and inventory screens, then finally deciding on some kind of build that was probably the shittest option I could have chosen, I've no idea, maybe it was the best, whatever, it summed up to putting a couple of points in something or other, anyway, eventually there I was, standing outside the vault. I then spend another 15 minutes pixel hunting to try and see how the game made the player aware of what was actually relevant information. Finally I set off. Killing the Rats was an ordeal. Like, an experiment to find the most cumbersome way imaginable to endure RPG combat. After unending misses and running out of Stimpacks I began to get the urge to drink bleach.

After "The Ordeal Of The Rats" I found another vault. At last, I'm getting somewhere. So I go into this vault and there's fuck all there. I spend another hour pixel hunting every damn inch of the place because everything looked like it had a use, but, no, it was pretty much just a boring but nice looking venue.

Moving on, I found myself in a large encampment. Oh, right, talky time. I spent another hour ploughing through the mindnumbing, insanity inducing, bottomless pit of the dialogue options of the first NPC I spoke to. My eyes were virtually shut on a permanent basis by this point. After finally finishing up my convo with this guy, and when I say finish I mean I just clicked the "end convo" button out of desperation, I then noticed that this camp was choc full of NPCs and after trying a few others I had, by this point, completely lost the will to live and was literally asleep. I awoke to find myself standing in the middle of this encampment with still another unlimited(?) number of NPCs to talk to. I closed the game down and never, ever, felt motivated to go back.

Combine this with the fact that I have a philosophical objection to ticking clock plots in exploration-based games and I hope you can see why this game just didn't work for me. But I'm happy to believe it "gets better", unfortunately I couldn't make it that far. I'm aware it's my loss.

 

[Haplo]

Git gud scrub.

 

[Lilura]

Looking forward to reading what you have to say about Tyranny in 2036.

RPGCodex: Where 40 year old newbies post their opinions 20 years late.

 

[Master]

I have a philosophical objection to ticking clock plots in exploration-based games

The ticking clock is an exploration element of the game. It makes you take into consideration time and place, how much time you need to get to a certain place. So the question of "where to go" becomes an actual decision. Otherwise it doesnt really matter, like in a Bethesda(and Obsidian) walking sim.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

The ticking clock is an exploration element of the game. It makes you take into consideration time and place, how much time you need to get to a certain place. So the question of "where to go" becomes an actual decision. Otherwise it doesnt really matter, like in practically every other RPG ever made.

FTFY.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

 

[Master]

The ticking clock is an exploration element of the game. It makes you take into consideration time and place, how much time you need to get to a certain place. So the question of "where to go" becomes an actual decision. Otherwise it doesnt really matter, like in practically every other RPG ever made.

FTFY.

So? They all suffer for it. Fuck them. FO1 is the best. Time limit is the best thing ever invented. Every main quest and even side quest should have a time limit. Fuck you youre not on vacation. RPGs are serious business. When the Overseer says you have 150 days to find the chip then he fucking means it. Otherwise he would be a filthy LARPer and liar just like you.

 

[Lilura]

Time limit is the best thing ever invented.

Sure sign of scrub is whining about time limits and anything related to it, like the spirit meter in Mask of the Betrayer.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

spirit meter in Mask of the Betrayer.

Oh, this is an excellent dumbfuck-detector.

 

[Leitz]

The first time I played Fallout I ragequitted right after I realized that the game was over after 130 (?) days, which I used up mostly by killling rats and shit. I hated the game for a year or so because of this. It's totally true that one could get a wrong impression from the game's start.

 

[CryptRat]

Fallout 1 & 2 are some of the rare modern cRPGs where I didn't think "any party-based turn-based crawler is better than this"; very fun games.