Today is embargo-lifting day, which means a whole mess of write-ups on Bethesda’s latest RPG have spilled onto the web. The scores, unsurprisingly, are extraordinarily high.
Which probably means I’m going to get my arse kicked for not loving it quite as much as everyone else.
It’s a review I’ll admit I struggled with, finding myself caught between the rock of real excitement at all the options the game offers and the hard place of extreme annoyance at some of the decisions Bethesda made – many of which are direct hangovers from Oblivion and are a bit more galling second time around. Particularly, I’m hyper-sensitive to not-quite-there characterisation in RPGs, and tend to feel that if you can’t make the acting absolutely spot-on, you’re better off with subtitles. (On that note, I enjoyed the Witcher EE quite a bit more with the still-awful English dialogue turned off in favour of subtitled Polish.) While it’s the 360 version I reviewed, I wrote and scored with the PC version (and this ol’ platform’s vast RPG heritage) in mind, which is possibly one reason I’m a little less super-enthusiastic than consolefolk, for whom this’ll be a bit more of a diamond in the rough.
I’ll talk more about it here later I’m sure, but short answer – a fabulous world and certainly not the mindless action game the more vocal anti-Bethesda lobby had pegged it has, but some of the lousy production values and the absolute necessity for ultra-violence keep me from truly loving it. A unquestionable must-play (even, I think, for the most rabid anti-Oblivion AIM) and a gift to explorers, but God, what a bit more slap’n'polish could have done for it. I absolutely cannot wait to see what the mod community manages to do with such a great world design, though.
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I’m sorry. I forgot to mention ALL games need a Bloody Mess perk.
@Deadpan. I guess it might be at character creation? Although they’ve switched the original Fallout system around, so you might be able to pick it up later aswell. I dunno. But did you completely miss the paragraphs about the overtly displayed gore gets very tired after a while? Fallout had great Bloody Messes because it was humorous, this next gen gore sounds like fail to me.
Anyways, great review to Alec, man that internet thing sucks (RPS commenters excluded), and I’ll probably be getting this. In a couple of years.
Yes. But I also saw the X-Play segment where they used Teddy Bears (!!!) as a projectile munition.
VAT to the Head + Teddy Bears + Bloody Mess = Awesomenuts.
The gore probably does get tired. I hope BM is optional at the start of character generation. Of course, I also wished I could use my PipBoy as a backup melee weapon.
Beth said they would work on Mod support for F3 later along the line, right?
My God… this is so so bad. And the worst part is, I think they did OK on the atmosphere, but God, the basic game mechanics just plain suck. I played for the last hour or so and it was painful.
I know I have to play more than just 1h to judge it better but, come on… 10/10? I just lost my respect for Eurogamer :(
What I would like to know is if it was 8.75 or 8.84 out of ten, or was it somewhere in between? I feel you’re not going into enough detail here.
Of course, I kid, but since I don’t have a lot of interest in this game (lacking many of the things needed to play it, such as time and a decent PC) I’ll stay away from the review and its seemingly toxic comments. Personally I find your reviews to be of a high standard anyway that I’d trust whate’er you had said about it. And I’d like to think that I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the score – buying second-hand games with lower scores when first they came out has hopefully robbed me of those prejudices, reducing “never play” to “play later”. Maybe.
Beths games have no atmosphere, except for morrowind and in that your reminded that its a game as soon as you speak to an npc.
Oblivion was a game made by accountants. Fallout 3 looks like its accountants with guns.
If anyone wants to see a good example of what people can do with no SDK or Construction Set, just a can-do attitude and a lot of spare time, look at Stalker. That game had brilliant mods made by people fiddling around in the game files.
“Fallout 3 looks like its accountants with guns.”
Frankly, that would be awesome.
Not as fun as Nuns with Guns on the Run from a Crucifixion.
*drums fingers waiting for work to end so he can raid Fry’s for a copy of F3*
Or maybe accountant pirates with guns?
Sailing on the wide accountant-sea/accountancy (Kudos if you worked out where thats from).
It’s 2008.
You don’t. Get kudos. For Python.
I think all your critiques are sound, Meer, though I do disagree on one point: The All Important Violence. The violence in the first two Fallouts was silly and overblown as well, so I don’t think the irony of the hyper-gore is lost on Betheseda. That said, the hilariously bad walking/running animations certainly aren’t intentional, and probably don’t do much to bolster my argument here.
Good review Alec!
The VATS slo-mo ultra-violence part really turned me off, it always seemed it would be like playing the originals with the “Bloody Mess” perk, which got tired after about 20 minutes.
What made the violence in fallout 1&2 humourous (phew spelling?) was the shock effect from scoring a critical, not just the animations. It’s a way of communicating “wow now you got lucky” to the player. I’m not surprised that the big B missed the “subtle” points regarding that particular part though after reading the developer interviews.
And like spd from russia; What about character development? Is S.P.E.C.I.A.L alive and kicking?
I don’t give a crap for ratings/ranks/decimal points/raging fanboys.
All I want to know is this: Good game or not? And no, I have not played oblivion and is it worth paying that extra bit of money for the exclusive collector items?
Oki dok, playing it as we speak, barely got out of the vault… It seems somewhat promising for now, I just finished far cry 2 and man was that one helluva’ frustrating game… these release dates are killing us…
The animations are indeed drowning in a pool of god damned uncanny, if you watch your character run from 3rd person view it’s like gazing upon a retarded proto-neanderthal shambling his way around… not to mention npc’s seem to *slide* along instead of actually stepping on the ground they tread.
Dialogue is meh for the most of it; at first everything seems pretty decent in the vault, with your father and most characters being voiced quite well… but then you go to megaton, and mista’ chucklat norris says howdy pardna’…
Leaving vault 101 and killing a minigun-wielding super mutant with my lame ass gun just five minutes later – maybe not a bad game, but come on, that’s not fallout !
“a relief to anyone who’s spent the last two years hearing Brother Jauffre’s omnipresent waffle in their nightmares”
Reason nr1 why I never finished Oblivion.
I think they need to change how they rate the game. Lately I have seen a lot of game with a lot of rating. Seriously, so MANY games with super good rating(9 to even 10 over 10 rating) that you can not even differ them anymore, while may be the only reason why the game got that high rating is because it is popular…
But anyway, I have played fallout 1 and fallout 2, so playing this game is kinda a must.
Quote:
“… come on, that’s not fallout !” (you mean Fallout surely)
Still, that’s pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?
Vince D. Weller over at IronTower Studios is having a go at it.
“I run into two armed guards in combat gear. The guards manage to reduce my health from 200 to 141, but die easily. Then I kill more guards. Then I kill the overseer. Then I kill some more guards, leaving a dead vault behind. At lvl 1. Unskilled. Wearing nothing but my vault pajamas.”
I’d be more convinced with your flame retardantness had the tone of your post not been so apologetic. About how you tried so hard to love it but couldn’t, and then still give it 8.8.
You could plant the text of your review somewhere else and give it a 7 and it wouldn’t look out of place. But then again, it’s IGN, congruence between scores and text aren’t relevant. All that matters is that it appears near the top at Metacritic.
I don’t see the problem finding a consistency from Alec’s review to the final score. If he’d reeled off a huge list of faults and things he couldn’t be doing with and then rated it highly with hardly a positive comment that’d be one thing. As it is, he elaborates on a few issues, some of which are related (a few different friendly NPC issues from the acting to their behaviour), while also taking time to praise aspects such as the basic way that VATs works, the setting and most importantly the game as a whole package.
It’s not a reviewer’s fault if you choose to only absorb the poor comments and then whine about the final score. I wasn’t struck by that review as it being “I don’t like it but I’ll grudgingly mark it up” so much as “I really like this game and wish these things didn’t stop it being one of my favourites.”
I’m in acronym hell right now. What the devil does AIM stand for?! Antisocial Internet Masses? Someone put me out of my misery.
“Angry Internet Men”
KG
What worries me about the “Angry Internet Men” acronym is that it might have only been the start of this thread where I saw it for the first time, and I’m already using it as though it’s the norm.
Stupid internet. >:(
The example of STALKER modding isn’t a good one, because those devs did a magnificent job of leaving their game data lying around where anyone could fiddle and faddle with it. (And yes, I mean that as praise. Heck, I was able to mod my own STALKER client’s respawn values with only a 2-minute learning curve.) At least in my cursory glances through FO3’s game files, I haven’t seen any similarly open, fiddle-able/faddle-able data. Yes, user communities have significantly modded games that were probably much less friendly than this one…but I still wouldn’t expect to see user mods anytime soon with mod tools or an SDK.
For me, Bethesda’s typical level of polish is exemplified at the very beginning of FO3, when the Overseer presents you with your PipBoy – and rather than you reaching out and accepting it, the PipBoy simply vanishes into thin air. HL2 and even earlier games “solved” this “problem” years ago, and it seems particularly outdated in the age of first-person animation like that in Far Cry 2. Bethesda is such a weird mix of clunky old-school amateurishness and top-dollar mainstream pretension, with a good dollop of Hollywood shallowness thrown in.
AOL Instant Messenger =(
Actually quite apt.
Well. I picked up the collector’s edition last night. Pretty much for the bobblehead, which is proudly serving as flair for my cubicle as I write this.
Installation was a snap. I didn’t even have to give it a serial, which I found odd. And I never got bugged about WFGL at all.
I managed to not kill the Overseer. And managed to get a little questing in before I turned in.
Sadly, Bloody Mess wasn’t available at the first couple of levels. But I did manage to cheat (a leetle bit) and build the Rock-It Launcher (woot!).
A few minor issues I’ve found…
- I didn’t see an option to adjust resolution, but all the pretties were turned to 11 on my machine and ran just fine.
- Like in Oblivion, it’s really easy to accidentally ’steal’ something and get the snot beaten out of you when trying to sit down.
But it’s been fun so far.
Look Mom! I’ve found some flamebait! Can I keep it? Please, mom? Pretty please?
That scathing assault on Alec’s writing was both hilarious and on the money. Bravo!
“stick in with your English lessons”. Classic!
Does anyone know if or when play.com is shipping the game? I won’t receive a notification email myself as I’m getting it as a present, but was just getting impatient (Far Cry 2 is keeping me thoroughly engrossed for the meantime; blowing up multiple vehicles never gets old).
P.
I ordered from play.com on Tuesday, it shipped same day and arrived this morning.
@Dan and Paul
I got mine today also.
Received this as a birthday present and finally got round to trying it out tonight. Only just stepped out of the Vault, so can’t speak for the world outside at all.
However, the entire Vault section was a little embarassingly lame. Sluggish combat, although VATS is fun (but also a bit random when playing from a first person perspective). Their attempts to do a proper FPS right-click-zoom thing are rather sad due to the weapons failing to go to proper ‘iron-sights’ – what exactly is the point otherwise? It just becomes a strange zoom lens. Voice acting so far is adequate – Neeson is good – but the animation and behaviour of characters is staggeringly awful. The crazy zoom/pan thing on dialogue actually seems more intrusive than it was in Oblivion. Graphics don’t seem to have moved on since Oblivion either, so seem rather limited compared to, say, Bioshock (which had a generally similar setting to the Vault), Call of Duty 4 (which had great animation) or Half Life 2 (which had mostly convincing characters).
The entire Vault section feels like a first draft. There are great ideas in there, and structurally it’s very clever. But there’s absolutely zero polish – this is the kind of state it should be in early in development. That it’s been released and is still this clunky really confuses me – it’s not like Bethesda have a lack of cash.
Odd.
Seems to me like the PC will be the definitive version to get as I suspect the modding community will fix alot of these problems fairly quickly. I expect there will be a mod to remove the vats slowmo gore hijinks very soon.
I think this is the first RPG that was boring to me from the early start. I was jawning all the way to Megaton. There it became a little more interesting, but I still can’t shake the Oblivionish feeling about it all. It just throws me off the Fallout feeling and I can’t really immerse (used a popular term here :P).
Hope it will get better soon.
Their games always seem to lack immersion. I think anyone can notice the difference between Oblivion and The Witcher.
The Witcher has immersion it has context, you may be doing boring quests collecting animal parts. But it has a good reason, everything in the world fits together. Monsters dont just pop up out of nowhere to attack the player because the designers think it might be fun to have an encounter every 1.03 minutes.
You can easily avoid monsters if wish and you can easily find ones that you might want because they have a reality and a behaviour which causes carrion monsters to be found near corpses, etc.
Building a world takes more than just plonking down randomnly towns, creatures, and items.
Even the older RPGs had the conceit to pretend to be something more than a game by keeping things as contexual and consistent as possible, and by always obeying their own internal rules.
With Oblivion and Morrowind I always knew it was a game when I tried certain things, which is ok, but thats not really what RPGs are about.