We don’t waffle much about Fallout 3 here, as it wasn’t a game that especially grabbed any of us. Which hardly matters a jot inna final analysis: the rapturous reception from other critics and gamers alike has meant Bethesda have cheerfully been DLCing up it to the eyeballs since release (with, I gather, wildly varying degrees of success). The upcoming Mothership Zeta caught my eye more than the others (aside from the ‘yeah, we did mess up Fallout 3’s ending’ admission that was Broken Steel), simply because it takes us out of that desaturated post-apocalyptic wasteland and onto a fully armed and operational alien battlestation, via the fun plot-twist of having you suffer alien abduction. Are there colours in space? Find out after the break…
Well, to call Mothership Zeta colourful would be pushing it, but certainly a switch to a pristine environment based around other-worldly tech rather than the 50s steampunkery of the traditional Fallout world seems to create a whole new sense of place. Apparently, Zeta will reuse very few existing Fallout 3 assets, and going on the most recent screenshots may even have dispensed with the sepia.
A genuine encounter with the aliens who’ve left so many traces of themselves on post-apocalyptic Earth but have very rarely shown up in person may a bit of a game-changer too. They’ve been something the games have used as a fun-but-sinister background element for some time, so to (hopefully) finally work out why they came to Earth and what they’re up to now will answer some long-standing questions. Fallout 3 actively presaged this with the Recon Craft Theta Crash Site special encounter, even including an alien corpse to gawp at. Which Fallout 1 had also done, interestingly.
So will Mothership Zeta do something with the playful governmental interference hints of the first game, or tread a whole new path? If the latter, this is a risk it becomes too incongruous with what has gone before.
A reason to go back to Fallout 3, then? Or just Oblivion With Guns On A Spaceship? We find out on August 3rd.
Official details of the 800 Micro-points add-on, because we all like lists:
Description: Defy hostile alien abductors and fight your way off of the massive Mothership Zeta, orbiting Earth miles above the Capital Wasteland. Mothership Zeta takes Fallout 3 in an entirely new direction – outer space. Meet new characters and join with them in a desperate bid to escape the Aliens’ clutches. To do so, you’ll wield powerful new weapons, like the Alien Atomizer, Alien Disintegrator, and Drone Cannon, and deck yourself out in brand new outfits, like the Gemini-Era Spacesuit and even Samurai Armor.
Story: A strange Alien signal is being broadcast throughout the Capital Wasteland, originating from a crashed UFO. Is it a distress call, or something far more sinister? That question is answered when you find yourself beamed aboard an enormous Alien spacecraft, with only one alternative – to fight your way to the bridge of the ship and secure your escape.
Key Features:
Find and exploit new and destructive alien technology, like the Alien Atomizer and Drone Cannon.
Explore the vast Mothership and learn the secrets of the Aliens’ master plan.
Thwart the Aliens’ attempt to stop your escape, and take over the Alien ship before it wreaks havoc on the unsuspecting Earth below.
Fight against the Alien Invaders, their robot drones, and turn their own horrible experiments against them.
Ally yourself with an unexpected array of characters, both from the Capital Wasteland and from Earth’s past.
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LOL @ Starky. Ahem brother. I agree with you totally I hated the first two fallout games but enjoyed fallout 3. I couldn’t stand to read LORT but loved the movies. (and it’s not like I don’t enjoy reading I’ve read the entire Wheel of Time series and Sword of Truth series several times, LORT is just to simplistic to me, I did like the Hobbit however)
Whenever I read “brother” (in the “buddy/pal context) it always sounds like hulk hogan is saying it…
Great, now I do too.
I spelled Amen wrong too so I duno what Ahem brother :P alls I know is the Hulkamania is gonna run wild over you!
I don’t which is worse—Starky’s trolling, or Serondal’s agreement.
@Starky: Your analogy is better, however the bonus will not add anything to the taste of the original cooked meal. And the only omission from you analogy is that the cooked meal delivered by Bethesda was not really what it supposed to be. ;)
@Meat Circus: I share the feeling.
@Alaric: My analogy was wrong as demonstrated by Starky, however the mod kit still doesn’t improve Bethesda mediocre craftmanship. You can get drunk with still water but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to follow the trend. There are many motives why Fallout 3 is going straight to franchises hell, but in the end it doesn’t matter: you got great fun with a lot of dlcs, I didn’t.
One question for you: After so many dlcs, can you describe one thing that is essential to Fallout 3 experience and is elevating the game above the originals?
I only agree with Starkys last paragraph, not his own all agressive tone ect. I played both Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 and I hated them both, I’m sorry :( I played Fallout 3 and really enjoyed it but like many other people I got bored of it quickly. what I did play I enjoyed. The only reason I fizzeld out was because I started cheating! I always do that to myself, same reason I’ll never finish Witcher I found a way to cheat. I played through Dawn of War 2 and enjoyed it the whole time because I didn’t cheat at all. I hate myself for cheating ;P
I think I should go on record as stating that the last 2 paragraphs of my last post were PURE FECKING SARCASM…
The lack of ability from people to notice makes me think this should be an American site, not a British one.
Here’s the step by step explanation why
I posted (commend in bold brackets)
Just the same as those idiots you find on movie forums who loved something, but anyone who didn’t like it “didn’t get it” or “is too stupid to understand the depth/subtlety”. [Take not of this]
It’s idiotic either way. That said: you CLEARLY don’t get fallout 3, you’re obviously not smart enough to understand the subtexts the game offers and the fantastic script hidden in the games many sub-quests. You’re just too ignorant and because of that your opinion is worthless.[Take note of the note above, notice anything? Yeah I just said exactly what I said was stupid and only makes you look like a fool... huge sarcasm arlams should have gone off with that]
Fallout 1 and 2 were crap [Clearly not true, people may not like them but only a fool would mark them as garbage games of no value], Bethesda totally saved a crappy IP and made it something worthwhile and great. Just like Peter Jackson turned those crappy books no one gave a damn about and turned them into the best movies ever created. Now – just like then – only the loser nerds (the ones even fellow nerds look down on for being just too lame) complained.[Again, the sarcasm backed up by something so stupid that it has to be sarcasm, it just had to be - people may not like tolkiens storytelling (he was a world/mythos-builder, his world was amazing, his characters a bit dry and his fiction somewhat bland - fair criticism - but the guy invented the entire sodding genre of modern fantasy... and while I love Pete Jacksons movies as much as the next guy, they are no more the best movie evar!!111 Than The Dark Knight was the best movie ever.]
Hope that clears things up for the sarcasm impaired.
@Starky
Hey! I’m American and I got that from the outset.
Frankly, I think some people skim posts until they find something that pisses them off, then respond to that. The internet is no place for self reflection, after all, which is basically what you were asking for.
Again just so it is crystal clear!
Liking artistic media, or not is fine. Art is subjective, love what you love and hate what you hate no matter what people think. Just beware the hubris that just because you think something is brilliant/worthless doesn’t mean everyone else should think the same. It also does not mean that your personal taste is better than anyone elses. It does not make you smarter, it does not make you more refined, it does not make you enlightened.
I personally hate country and western music, can’t stomach it at all (with the single exception of Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt), just because a bunch of dumb americans love the stuff doesn’t mean all people who love it are dumb, or that the genre itself is dumb – I’m know for fact that it can be just as complex, mature, and sophisticated as any Classical music, Jazz or any other genre you care to pick.
@Vin
Yeah I suspect something like that.
Oh how better the world would be if people just stopped for 15-30 seconds every hour for a little self reflection.
P.S. (wtb edit function) Stereotypes are fun, so long as people are smart enoigh to realize they are stereotypes – they have some truth, but clearly do not apply to all.
So yeah, Americans just don’t get irony, or sarcasm, and my American brother (hulk hogan voice) who does get it – you know it.
If I didn’t hate Brits with a deep-seated, generations-long passion, Starky would be my new favorite poster.
Nalano, you sure you don’t mean the English?
Would it ain’t your love for me if I were to reveal that I’m Celtic (half Scottish, half Irish)?
Starky maybe your troll post wasn’t important enough to analyze?
As for why the sum of the parts gets high scores when all the individual parts are mediocre at best… My theory is that it’s difficult to put yourself in the I’m an objective reviewer seat, take a look at the HUGE WORLD! and MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DETAIL! and OVER 1000000 LOCATIONS! and then say that the developers didn’t try hard enough.
Oblivion’s gameplay was fundamentally broken on its most basic levels, a fact that was discarded by most as a minor annoyance. If that bothers you, maybe you have slightly different priorities than game reviewers… and wildly different priorities than game consumers.
Tolkein invented nothing. elves dwarves dragons and hobbits already existed and were written about long before he wrote that crap tastic book everyone seems to love so much they forgot the few hundred years of mythology it’s based on. Aduh
I never sdaid he invented mythology, dwarves, elves or so on, I said he invented MODERN fantasy.
Which he did.
Before Tolkien you had old folktales, elves dwarves and so on yes, all different all unique. The myth of elves and dwarves for example often crossed and were basically one and the same (Norse dark elves)
After Tolkien you had the modern fantasy setting, He took all that mythology, stitched it together into a world.
He invented a language for it, he created that pattern which almost all fantasy has followed from.
Just as vampires existed in myth before Bram Stoker, it doesn’t change the fact that he basically invented the modern take on the Vampire Myth, and almost all vampire fiction that has followed has being massively influenced by his works.
Nobody has forgotten anything of mythology, hell I’d go so far as to say we know more about mythology now than we ever have, given the dedicated works of many, many people studying it…
To dismiss his works as “crap tastic” or deny the influence and power they’ve had, to deny that Tolkien was the first to create that fantasy world template that almost all modern fantasy uses – is idiotic on a scale usually reserved for creationist arguments.
I sure hope I get to get Elvis to join my party and run around some new corridors with new guns.
ASIDE: As someone who plays a lot of non-computer roleplaying games I get pretty confused by what people’s expectations are for computer-based “roleplaying games”. I actually used CRPGs as an example fo a kind of game that I’d play where I had, in essence, zero creative engagement.
Sometimes I think people are asking too much of CRPGs – or at least they are asking the wrong things. What the right things are though is something I haven’t worked out. Presumably it is not something like “My Life With Master” or “Dogs in the Vineyard”, but it is also more than just “Baldur’s Gate, Again, With Better 3D Bosoms”.
Starky: textual sarcasms is a subtle and perilous art. My advice is to just say what you actually mean or run the entirely avoidable risk of being thought of as an idiot by the people you are trying to appeal to – and of being thought of as clever by the people you think are idiots. And we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?
For god’s sake, he made a sounds argument about how to avoid making an ass of yourself and then closed the post by doing EXACTLY what he’d just described as assinine. It seems to me this is one of those rare cases where you really don’t need tone to be able to figure out that you’re dealing with sarcasm.
There’s a pretty lulzy LP thread going on, on the Codex which shows just how horrible Fallout 3 is as an RPG and as an FPS. I suggest people read it, if only for the lulz.
“The sarcasm backed up by something so stupid that it has to be sarcasm, it just had to be.”
Yeah, see, that doesn’t work on the Internet, because there are people that stupid.
You could provide me with definitive, unarguable proof that Fallout 3 is the worst game ever to be produced on any system and that it’s going to singlehandedly destroy the videogame and entertainment industries and subsequently cause the end of Western civilisation, and I’d still think it was a fun game.
What can I say, I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed Fallout 1 and 2 and think Planescape: Torment is man’s crowning achievement.
Go on, put me in a box.
/puts you in a box.
@Starky
Yes, yes it would.
But can I get armour for my horse?
Yanno, I was thinking about this today, and I had a bit of a revelation and I wanted to share…
This DLC could actually have a mod created to tie in with it which would be a nice solution to fast travel. The thing that bugged me the most about Fallout 3 was the ability to magic travel, and wandering around on foot made the land area feel far too small. (Hey, it’s that water tower again. Hi water tower!)
The vehicle mods are fun, but not really practical, I looked into those because Fallout 2 had the right idea; give the player a car! However, due to the nature of the movement system in Bethy games, it works about as well as the Horse did in Oblivion… which is to say; pretty damn poorly. And there are further hitches that made it worse than that.
However…
If you’re still reading and you haven’t made the idiot assumption that this is a post to bash Fallout 3 (good for you, you can actually set aside rashly made assumptions in favour of observation, which most of humanity tends to be incapable of), then you’ll be rewarded as I’m about to get to the meat of the matter.
Mothership Zeta presents us with an interesting possibility for a mod, as I said. Envision this…
The first part of the mod is that it completely disables Fast Travel, a mix of slowing the overall player movement speed along with the inclusion of the sprint mod could also help give the World a larger feel, but I digress…. we start off with disabling fast travel.
Then, when one is aboard the Mothership, one can gain the ability to hop around, akin to Star Trek’s transporters or Cable’s bodysliding. You’d be able to get a replenishable amount of ‘translocator beacons’ which could be named and then dropped in place as a static item.
So for example, I could name one ‘Canterbury Commons’ and drop it just outside the town.
One would also have an alien device that can scan the area of the Capitol Wasteland for translocator beacons and present a list, showing the names of the beacons as they were given by the player, thus presenting a list of locations that the player has visited and dropped a translocator beacon at.
The player would then select one, and opt to ‘translocate’. This would move them to the selected beacon, and as the area finishes loading in, a rift-like animation plays around the player signalling that they’ve just arrived at their destination, which will be a short distance from the translocator beacon.
Furthermore, such a system would also allow for easier house mods, the player could go to their house and drop a translocator beacon outside, or even inside their house, this would allow players to perform transports to their favourite shops or place of rest, even.
To finish up, the player could even have a temporary translocation return, which they could drop, translocate somewhere, and then go back to where they were at which point that item would become useless, these would be replenishable too, of course, but the player would probably have to find the items to build them, or power them via fission batteries or whatnot.
Having that tech around as part of the Fallout world would be a bit silly, even as top-secret Gov’t tech. However, having that around as a form of alien technology? Now there’s an idea, eh? And considering the thought that Star Trek came about in the 60’s, it’s not that far off the era of Sci-Fi that Fallout tends to represent.
Plus it could be cheesed up a bit by giving the translocators gigantic antennae with balls at the end and little rings around, and good stuff like that.
So yes, such a mod tied into the arrival of Mothership Beta could fix the primary niggling aspect of Fallout 3 for me, forever. No more WhizzBangMagicTransport, and no more passing that damned water tower for the billionth time.