By Alec Meer on July 21st, 2009 at 4:26 pm.
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.
Different shaped corridors with different shaped things to kill with BRAND NEW GUNS.
Bethesda still haven’t got their heads around this whole DLC-in-RPGs thing, bless ‘em.
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It’s an embarassment
of riches, alright.report
looks fun, i only recently got fallout 3 and all the dlc’s and im looking forward to this one, point lookout has been the best so far, because of its change of environment and the size of it all, plus blowing up a mansion is awesome
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The aliens remind me of Cryto from Destroy all Humans, though I suppose the key question is whether the gun flights in hard vacuum will be silent.
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The aliens hip/blaster were just one of the little easter eggs in Fallout.. it’s a shame they led to this.. which both looks and sounds utterly out of place and frankly idiotic.
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The alien mastermind is Elvis, obviously.
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So you can buy mutating an already existing organism into a supermutant or a ghoul, you can buy a giant walking robot, you can buy virtual reality, ai, laser pistols, etc., but you can’t buy aliens and spacecraft?
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I reminds me of a 80′s serie. “Logans Runs”, about a guy escaping from a vault city. One one episode ( Stargate ) the guy meet some aliens, on the apocalyptic earth.
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It does look completely out of place. Maybe they’ll surprise us, but still…
Fallout 3 didn’t have good shooter mechanics, so why would they make singleplayer FPS campaigns for it as DLC?
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I’ve been reviewing these add-ons for Computers N Stuff – only Point Lookout really got its head around what made the main game interesting, which was allowing quests and storylines to be resolved without shooting everything in sight.
Broken Steel didn’t start too badly, but I was just fed up of cutting down Enclave soldiers by the end and it looks like Zeta is going to send the DLC packs out with a whimper.
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“Thwart the Aliens’ attempt to stop your escape, and take over the Alien ship before it wreaks havoc on the unsuspecting Earth below…”
Just when they thought a mostly-dead Human civilisation, almost destroyed by nuclear war and populated with giant, killer mutants; free-roaming, psychotic gangs; slavers, technologically-advanced, military expansionists; the living dead, rad-infected wastelands with no drinkable water, insane robots looking for excuses to turn on their masters, aggressive mutant-wildlife which will eviscerate you on-sight, weren’t quite havoc enough…
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“but you can’t buy aliens and spacecraft?”
Ah yes, trot out that tired old argument, why not. Just because something contains elements that are far fetched does not mean that every far fetched element fits into the same world just as well. Sense of place, “rules” of setting, callit what you will. I suppose I’ll just add giant farting worms because they are just as unrealistic as mutants, that won’t jar at all.
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It’s a bit of a shame to see a sly homage/easter egg turned into a full-blown aknowledgement of active alien life in the Fallout universe. But I’ve thoroughly (and unexpectedly) enjoyed F3 so far, along with most of it’s DLC. So, I think I shall be getting this, too.
I do wish some of the better open world or RPGs got this treatment (Stalker, for example, and Bloodlines in my wildest dreams).
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If the tone was cheesy b-movie aliens or little greys abducting everyone for probing then this could be great.
Doesn’t really look that way though, does it? And I’m someone who loved Fallout 3.
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@Alaric
It’s not so much about believing in a crazy thing in an otherwise crazy game, it’s about something being appropriate for a setting or genre. If you were watching a Mad Max movie and an alien saucer swooped in and started shooting up Bartertown, that would seem a little out of place, no? Wouldn’t fit in with the kind of world that’s trying to be shown, or the type of story that’s being told.
This applies more to the Fallout series as a whole and how it’s going to reflect on the first Fallouts though; Fallout 3 is pretty much a lost cause when it comes to having a consistent setting or sensical story.
Of course, with all that, I’m still probably going to buy it and enjoy it to some degree, and then mess around with the new assets in the editor afterwards, so what do I know. :P
-Pax
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The next DLC will be a full re-enactment of A Christmas Story, afterall there was a Red Ryder BB gun, it makes perfect sense.
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I would buy this if the aliens from Mars Attacks! were in it.
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This actually look’s like it could be fun, but it won’t be as good as Prey ;)
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I’m still waiting for the disc-based DLC collections so I don’t have to deal with GFWL. I enjoyed FO3 enormously, though, so there’s no question I’ll be getting all of them. I went out of my way, in my first 100ish hour playthrough, to leave some areas unexplored so that when I came back modded and DLCed up that I’d have a few corners of the old game to experience fresh along with all the new stuff.
Damn I love Bethesda RPGs.
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@Nick:
OMG YES AWESOME. I triple-dog dare you.
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Gentlemen, I respectfully disagree.
Fallout setting is a post-apocalyptic one, which in itself is a subset of larger science fiction setting. I understand your argument when you say that the plot has to be kept within certain guidelines appropriate to the genre, but in this case there isn’t any contradiction.
If one of the DLCs included an Elven wizard riding a dragon, I’d join you in being displeased. However, non-terrestrial life does not contradict any cornerstones of the Fallout universe.
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@Vinraith:
They release pairs of DLC on disk for $20US (same as buying online). I got Op:Anchorage and The Pitt that way. From wikipedia:
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How can anyone argue this is inappropriate to the setting?
Has there every been a Fallout game that didn’t have an alien spacecraft (and the requisite alien blaster) in some corner of it?
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And never mind easter eggs, I remember fighting many aliens on the tanker in Fallout 2 (though I guess those might have been weird mutants).
In any case, remember that the ‘setting rules’ are pulp, early-20th Century sci-fi (atomic cars and giant ants!). Being abducted by a flying saucer fits entirely within this.
The only concern I feel about this dlc is that it seems Bethesda have again mistaken their rpg for an fps.
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It’s not about being appropriate or not, it’s a question of theme. Alien presence in Fallout has been mostly a curio, and at some point someone in the Fallout 2 dev team even said the Wanamingos in Fallout 2 were a bit overboard. Even if you’re keen on ignoring the difference between setting and easter egg, making an entire game – or in this case an expansion – based around it is like picking up on Silent Hill’s UFO ending and making an entire SH DLC based around alien abduction. Yeah, aliens featured in Silent Hill. Hardly means they’re an appropriate subject matter in regards to the rest of the themes explored in the games.
Then again, hey. We already had Monty Python references in Fallout so I’m sure an entire DLC about searching for Holy Hand Grenades of Antioch is not out of place in post-apoc wastelands. Seriously – medieval knights in a setting that went out of its way to detach itself from medieval-styled RPGs at the time? Can hardly wait!
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@Vinraith – “How can anyone argue this is inappropriate to the setting?”
I’ve seen crazy Fallout ‘fans’ argue that Fallout 2 isn’t series canon. There’s easily ten times as many people who would swear blind that Fallout 3 raped their dog and shot their parents.
Personally, I’m rather glad that they’re not only adding a bunch of weird new stuff for their final DLC, but also stopping with adding new stuff, as this will allow them to finally release a static ‘Game of The Year’ edition and that’ll become the new baseline upon which mods can be built, using all that lovely new content to tweak and abuse in new and interesting ways.
I’ve said it elsewhere, but the Fallout 3 modding scene is rermarkably organized and industrious (compared to the Oblivion modding scene, who were industrious and chaotic), even if they wouldn’t know how to write an intelligible readme file if their lives depended on it.
Tangentially, it just occured to me that we’ve seen very little in the way of ‘THIS IS HOW THE GAME SHOULD BE’ mods from the NMA crowd, even now that they’ve got access to the full modding toolset. Those guys know how to make a noise, but tend not to actually produce much of note.
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@Dominic
Good point, Fallout does seem to inspire a certain crazed fan response in some quarters.
I agree that I’m glad to see something exotic added, and I’m glad to see the DLC officially stopped so we can have a “complete” edition. Any good balance mods your aware of, by the way?
And yeah, the NMA types are notoriously “all talk.” I think the “AIM” meme is too often used and too often misapplied, but if ever a crowd deserved it it would be them.
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Now, now – please don’t antagonise people with sweeping generalisations.
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I’m waiting until they do an expansion pack (disk or Steam) with all the DLC in one, it is overpriced at the moment and I refuse to use GFWL to get it.
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Sweeping generalisations?! On mah interwebs?!
Say it ain’t so.
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To all the people complaining about the DLC being out of place am I the only one here that realizes that you do not have to download the content and thus not let its outofplacaness spoil “your” version of the game ?
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I think Bethesda should fix the DLC for the PC first before making more expansions. I’m unable to play any DLC for more than a couple minutes without it crashing.
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This is more of a general statement, but we really need to stop with the “but Fallout 1 and 2 did things this way” talk. Let it go. It will never be again. Bethesda, for better or worse, is now in control of the lore from here on out.
In a more direct statement, how can we say that because Fallout 1 (over 200 years in the past according to the timeline) had no direct contact with aliens, that Fallout 3 shant better never have aliens in it. Eventually, the aliens would have made an appearance, no matter who was devvin that B, let’s just hope that they do a good job with the story rather than lament pointlessly that the aliens should never have been in the game at all.
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@jon_hill: Ya, I only paid $25 for the full game. I’m hardly gonig to drop $10 per expansion. Bleh. Especially since I’m afraid I’ll be burnt out by then. I really enjoyed Oblivion (vanilla!), but only started on Shivering Isles before I suddenly got bored with the game.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Fallout 3. Several of the areas you can stumble onto (Vault 106, Tenpenny’s Hotel, the “trapped in the computer” bit) have been really fun. The main story is kinda’ meh. It is the first time in awhile that I spend every free moment I have playing a game. I know a game is good when I’m annoyed to stop playing in order to watch some HBO (True Blood, Big Love, etc.) with the wife.
And yes, please put the DLC on Steam. I will not be purchasing any Microsoft Points, or being involved with LIVE if at all possible.
Bring on the shiny alien ships too.
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The concern that this will be another Anchorage-style FPS lite is pretty fair, the press release is pretty ecstatic about blowing things up. The blurb about allying with members from Earth’s past sounds like it has good potential though. Hopefully it will be fun.
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I bought the first three add-ons (crying about M$’s GfWL “buy an $8 add-on with $10 worth of credits!” bullshit all the while) but I couldn’t even drag myself to play the game another time through to even see the retconned ending of Broken Steel.
It felt all so damn samey after a while.
In terms of writing, there are ways to make people think your work is quirky and stylistic, and there are ways to make people think it’s just a hodgepodge jumble of memes.
To do the former, make the world run in a rational manner except where your fancy takes you – 50′s retro-future computers, lasers, etc; but logical explanations for food, protection, etc – and people will more readily accept the suspension of disbelief needed for the parts you found fun.
To do the latter, take every little in-joke and make it canon, ’til the entire world runs on some ridiculous phlebotinum. I see this as that.
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Oh, and why is the retard in the screenshots wearing a Vault 101 suit? He literally never found a better piece of armor for the entire game?!?
I know it is for marketing purposes, but still…..
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can’t wait to kill some aliens with Elvis and Michael Jackson (Or is it to soon for that?) As far as Shiving Isle goes you should go back and give it a try, I had more fun playing that expansion then I did Oblivion as a whole. (even if you just get to the main town and smack Sheogorath in the face to see how he responds it’d be worth it)
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How ridiculous to be arguing about the setting. I understand you enjoy Fallout, and I think we can all say the same. But that enjoyment doesn’t make it some masterpiece of storytelling or impressive narrative. A little divergence and fun isn’t going to ruin the OH SO GREAT mythos that is the Fallout Bible.
I’m not worried about the “integrity” of the game, since I haven’t felt any reason to doubt Beth yet, since they at least made a story better than FO2 or any of the spinoffs. I’m just worried about whether it’s going to be another ridiculous shootemup, or a real FPS RPG experience, where the tongue is as mighty as the sword.
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I don’t think the tongue is going to be any good against aliens Aharon, unless they’re sicky
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Well, if Indiana Jones can meet aliens.
Really, this is like jumping the shark, but I like it nonetheless. Variety is good and more FO3 is good too. I hope they keep making those DLC as long as they don’t make a prequel chapter showing your character when he was a kid and having a comic relief side kick.
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Wanamingos were biological weapons made by humans, although they spoofed Alien.
Real aliens were an easter egg in Fallout.
I’m totally expecting a NEW!!! DLC featuring that Dr. Who time machine from the first game…
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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.
It was a joke! Goddamn it Bethesda! Just like the TARDIS in the Wasteland, and Harold’s tree, it was a fraking joke!
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Easier to crib someone else’s ideas than to be creative yourself, Zyrxil.
Sadly.
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@jon_hill987: I’m waiting on them to finish up the DLC too, that’s why I skipped the steam sale a week or two ago. They’ve announced a GOTY edition is coming out for this Christmas season and will include all DLC. The DLC is also being made available in boxes by itself, but at $20 for a box with two DLCs, I’m not sure you’d be saving any money. Though avoiding the GFWL experience is probably worth it.
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Obviously it wasn’t a joke. They probably had his planned all along.
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Hey, while we are at it, how about DLC based on a whale that falls from the sky and a pot of petunias!
And a bridgekeeper with a smelly robe.
Fallout is serious business…
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Again, a reality check:
This is an entirely optional addon. You don’t have to buy it. You don’t have to play it. You don’t have to enjoy it. It’s unlikely to be required for anything until the GOTY edition rolls round and mods start fully using the content within.
Also, for those who consider Fallout 3 a watered-down abomination of a game, it also includes a very powerful mod toolkit. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted for years? A nuke-it-yourself Fallout development kit? You’ve got an engine, tons of resources and no shortage of documentation and help from existing modders, to get to it.
I wouldn’t find the complaining as annoying if they were a little more proactive. This isn’t like Fallout 2, where the first decent mods didn’t come out until around a decade after release. They’re giving the setting to you on a platter. A silver platter. A POLISHED silver platter with parsley garnish around the edges.
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I would buy this and all the other Fallout 3 DLC if only Microsoft would actually sell it to me. There is very little more annoying than a company selling a game worldwide only to then force regional restrictions on the DLC.
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All I see is a new stage to go guns blazing. :p
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I just dunno if this is going to be very effective to me after having played Prey. I don’t think it could compare. I hope I’m wrong though :)
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@Dominic: You’re completely missing the point. People are complaining about Bethesda once again making a joke from the first two Fallouts a cornerstone of the game, just like they did with bloody mess.
Fallout 3 is a good game but it’s remarkable how deaf Bethesda is when it comes to the tone and humor of the first two games.
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@Dom
Y’know, I’ve seen more complaining about NMA than I’ve seen complaining by NMA over Fallout 3, and it’s beginning to rub me the wrong way that every critique of the writing of the game (and yes, I do sometimes buy RPGs for the writing, not just the toolset) is dismissed as more wild whinging from the peanut gallery.
I don’t have to buy it, and I won’t, for no matter how much the setting made me want to come back (and they did a nice job on the setting), the writing drove me off again.
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You know why Fallout 3 is a terrible game? It doesn’t allow the player to build a weapon by combining a broom handle with a giant radioactive sex-toy. Damn you, Bethesda, you’ve ruined the whole setting! You never listen to fans! OMG!
/sigh…
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I don’t know if I would go so far as to say Mothership Zeta is a “cornerstone” of the game. They just took the hints and easter eggs from the previous games, and created aliens as a more direct force in this next DLC. If they made the aliens responsible for the Great War, then that would be making it a cornerstone.
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I think the prime reason Fallout 3 is so overhyped is the fact that console gamers just don’t get many open world games. I like Oblivion, but I don’t think of it as amazing like some do. I like Fallout 3, but I don’t think of it as amazing like some do(not to mention the DLC should have been in the base game to make up for the massive lack of content).
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A fun idea but if indeed it brings nothing but “only one alternative – to fight your way to the bridge of the ship” … then it seems pretty meh.
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Was it really rapturously received?
I mean, I know Eurogamer’s Kristan Reed liked it, but he’s aesthetically compromised anyway, and everybody else was just a 360 fratboi gamer with limited taste/horizons/intelligence.
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God, bashing on Fallout 3 is like the new “cool” thing isn’t it? It all smacks to me as people playing follow the leader with their opinions, or to be more exact “I’m a special unique snowflake, LOADS of people loved fallout 3, so I’m going to hate it”.
Dislike I can understand, apathy fine, everyone’s allowed not to enjoy a game, hate for what is clearly and deservedly a highly rated game.
It’s like when the goth/emo kids mock the fashionable kids in schools because they all dress the same and have no individuality (unlike them), failing to ever realise their clique is just as similar dressing (band Ts, leather bracelets and piercings) and fashion lead, just a minority fashion.
When it comes to fallout 3, I enjoyed it, didn’t love it, but have no doubt it’s a good game (one I really should when I can be arsed discover more of).
Bashing something just to be contrary to popular opinion only marks you an idiot.
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Ditto on that, Starky.
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Loved the nuke going off part
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On a related note, the pic on this article is kind of a quasi-spoiler. The game’s been out awhile and I can understand why you guys wouldn’t think twice about it (and I don’t mean this as an OMG YOU GUYZ SPOILED TEH GAME!11 post), I’m just a little sad that I saw it.
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NMA! Ha! Those radical malcontents don’t care about you, they don’t care about America! All they care about is fulfilling their own selfish desires. Until we meet again, this is your president, John Henry Eden, signing off.
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Steam it.
Now.
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I joke, of course. Fallout 3 was actually quite good. Shame about the (now mercifully retconned away) terrible ending.
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Fallout 3 is a good game but it’s remarkable how deaf Bethesda is when it comes to the tone and humor of the first two games.
Cause they don’t know how to do it and they never will. And I know it wasn’t a question.
@Dominic White: You logic is flawed. Any buyer plays to enjoy a specific Fallout setting, not to create his own Fallout setting. The mod toolkit is not increasing what-so-ever the value of so called Fallout 3 experience.
Is like going to a restaurant, they charge you a full price and in the end they put the potatoes/raw meat/other crap in your lap telling you to prepare your food!?
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@Alaric
…more’s the pity!
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Fallout 3 is a great game in it’s own right. Sod the other games (they’re great too, though). You can’t dwell too much on history. I mean, you never hear anyone complaining that the war in Iraq wasn’t as good as WWII (“it just didn’t get the setting right”)? Hmmm… that was tenuous in the extreme.
This sounds interesting. Always cool to have new stuff to do. I even enjoyed Op Anchorage to a point.
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Toro, that is the worst analogy I’ve ever heard…
A better one is it’s like going to a restaurant and getting your meal, it’s cooked fine, not to everyones tastes but many people love it. The included in the price of that meal the chef gives you the recipe, gives you a set of cooking knives and pots, and says he’ll give you the ingredients for free if you ever feel like cooking yourself.
You can just enjoy the meal and leave, or you can learn to become a chef, the choice is yours.
Then as an added bonus, everyone gets to enjoy free meals from the people who do decide to become chefs.
There THAT is a better analogy.
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@toro:
I’ve never seen much evidence that Bethesda have a sense of humour of any kind.
I have a terrible feeling that Three Dog was what the average Beth writer considers the ultimate in comic relief.
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Toro, I have a problem with your statement. Not because you don’t like a particular game (obviously it’s impossible for something to be loved by everyone) but due to the fact that you seem to treat your opinion as fact.
“they don’t know how to do it and they never will”
Really?
You don’t suppose you could be wrong, do you?
Oh and just so you know, there are a bunch of restaurants (some quite expensive) where you are given raw meat and a little stove.
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Bethesda should hire Neil Gaiman to write their next fallout game…
It would be a creation so awesome that gaming would begin a new Era, Before-Fallout 4″ (BF) and After-Fallout 4 (AF). It woudl be game of the year ever after, Game of the Year for new games would need to be changed to “Game after Fallout 4 of the year”.
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It’s just MegaTraveller with guns.
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I hope it’s the grays and not the reptillians. I hate the reptillians.
Seriously though, hopefully this is more “Gort! Klaatu Barada Nikto!” than “Aliens Vs. Predator.” I want some of that 50′s sensibility to carry over. And possibly a few references to Plan 9, if I’m lucky. ;)
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Dear god don’t let it be the Ethereal’s!
Actually oh god let it be, X-com/UFO in the fallout engine would be fucking awesome.
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Aw, man. Aliens like that? Really?
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Fallout 3: Shark Jumped
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I’d have liked it if all the aliens are actually men dressed in ill-fitting alien disguises, but only you seem to notice. And the spaceship is actually made of foam and cardboard, and wobbles if you run too fast.
Cutscenes where the spaceship has visible strings and everything, yeeeah.
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@Taillefer
That wouldn’t exactly fit in this case, but it’d make a BRILLIANT game on its own. Either a game where you’re trapped in a poorly made 50′s sci-fi movie, or even a more broadly constructed one where you’re trapped in a series of poorly made films of different genres. Hmm…
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Yutt : Shark Jumped (do to using Skull Man for gravatar)
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Vinraith that sounds like a sure hit mate! There would be a nice little section where the blob is after you and it’s killing all sorts of people who are just standing around and when you ask them why they don’t run they just stare at you and scream “THE BLOB!”
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Mothership Zeta, as paid DLC: “IT WRECKS THE WHOLE UNIVERSE ZOMG”
Mothership Zeta, as free DLC: “IT WRECKS THE WHOLE UNIVERSE ZOMG BUT I’M GONNA GET IT AND MAKE MODS THAT DON’T”
Mothership Zeta, as fan-created mod: “MOTY 20XX FOREVAR”
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@Elle Simple but extremly effective and true.
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Are you just trolling? I’m not a fanboi or anything, but F3 had at least 60 hours of content. How much content does a game need to meet your standards? I’ve never heard anyone make this complaint. Sure, the writing is not superb, the faces are still a bit weird (especially the ghouls, bleh), the textures are low res, etc. But a massive lack of content? Wah?? Please say “whoosh”!
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im waiting for the inevitable game of the year edition with all the dlc on disc :)
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The 40 minute shoot out I had in a super market would contend other wise Clovus (in your favor) With the climax being me releasing a deadly Lost in Space type robot into the mix allowing me to get away with the goods (also there was a seemingly randomly generated conflict between two factions in front of the super market when I arrived which added to the play time, and wasn’t there the next time I did a play there which I found very cool)
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Loved Fallout 3… best game I’ve played in the last 12 months for sure IN MY OPINION. Liked the DLC so far, although it does have some flaws… but hell, I’m not asking anybody to be perfect. Certainly looking forward to enjoy even more of this great game.
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Why does “fighting your way to the bridge” and the screencaps of the aliens in this new DLC make me think of that whole section with Elvis in Perfect Dark on the N64? :)
Agree with the comments about the mod community ( check http://www.fallout3nexus.com/ )for FO3, some of the stuff out there is pretty special (some is a bit daft, the usual nudity and anime hairdo’s, but hey)- different weather cycles, equipment tweaks and other balancing. One guy even went through the whole game tweaking the faces to make them a bit more realistic- no external textures or anything, just altering the sliders in the GECK. A lot of time on his hands, but thank you, sir for fixing Moira’s moustache… :D
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I want to make my contribution to the angry people:
Why aliens have to be gray dudes? why not womens from venus? hot amazons from venus?
Sexy aliens in latex.
Everyone know that venus is a huge wild jungle.
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This looks like it could be quite fun. And it isn’t like they haven’t been foreshadowing this since the first game, so I don’t have a problem with it fitting into the universe.
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I liked Fallout 3. I just think its a bit jarring going from a post apocalyptic RPG to a coridoor shooter in space. If that makes me some sort of reactionary psycho then so be it, though I’d argue those dismissing any and all complaints are just as fanatical as those decrying every aspect of the game.
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@Nick
No judgment implied here, but how is a corridor shooter sequence in space different from the corridor shooter sequences in the metro system, for example?
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Also it’s becoming increasingly tiresome getting heckled for expressing a negative opinion here.. “if you don’t like it don’t buy it.. but don’t you DARE have the audacity to say why you don’t like it’. Jesus christ people.
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@Vinraith: Its in space?
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Where did the Fallout Love go?
I’m dissapointed in all of you.
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“Tangentially, it just occured to me that we’ve seen very little in the way of ‘THIS IS HOW THE GAME SHOULD BE’ mods from the NMA crowd…”
Could that perhaps be because in order to mod a game, one first needs to purchase it, let alone care about it enough to invest the requisite considerable effort to get something releasable?
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@Nick
So your issue is with the change of setting, not the change of game genre? I’m not trying to be a pain here, I’m just honestly not following your reasoning here.
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@Radicand
This looks like it could be quite fun. And it isn’t like they haven’t been foreshadowing this since the first game, so I don’t have a problem with it fitting into the universe.
You mean besides the exact fact that there hasn’t been any foreshadowing of any kind? For the 20th time, it was a joke! All the random encounters were jokes. You didn’t really see Doctor Who, meet Monty Python’s Knights of the Round Table, find a scene from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or any of that.
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I wouldn’t really say it is over hyped at all, just not many people like it on this site, or at least the more vocal ones don’t like it, so there’s a bit of a disparity. Most people that I know who have played it really enjoyed it, and a lot of critics really enjoyed it as well. That doesn’t make it a conspiracy, nor does it mean that those durn console freaks are just deprived (even though they are) of good games, it just didn’t resonate with you in the same way it resonated with a large majority of people. I can accept that.
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Zyrxil – Only you did . . .That’s like saying that in “Life of Brian” Brian didn’t really end up in an alien space ship for part of the movie. He REALLY did, it was still a joke but he was really in a space ship.
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Hmm… not one mention of butt probes
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Also, those of you making slippery-slope arguments, it could be worse.
Those arguing against them, read the developer quotes.
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@Jeremy – Exactly. There’s a lot of very popular games that I don’t like. Pretty much everything by Blizzard, come to think of it, but I don’t go looking for Starcraft threads to tell people how dumb they are for liking it, that they don’t know what a real strategy game would be like, and that the positive reviews were all bribes, because that would be really, really dumb and wrong.
I just accept that it doesn’t fit my tastes, and expend more energy on enjoying things that I do like, rather than kvetching about those I don’t.
Y’know what? I really like the Halo series. Now there’s something that you can find limitless hate for on the internet. There were over a quarter-million people playing Halo 3 online this saturday. The internet echo chamber effect is just irritating.
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I will play Fallout 3 again when a total-overall style modpack appears that significantly changes the gameplay (eg the way some modpacks changed Oblivion). At that point I will get all the DLC, hopefully in one large and budget-priced package – in other words next year somtime, in all probability.
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@TeeJay – You’d be wanting Fallout: Wanderer’s Edition (makes the game much more like STALKER in terms of gameplay – semi-realistic and tactical, and adds tons more weapon types), and Mart’s Mutant Mod (tons of new enemy types and variants, larger spawns, more action), and probably Weapon Mod Kits (lets you visibly upgrade your favourite guns).
Pretty much makes F3 a different game, and those are all designed to play nice with each other, too.
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I’m very hungry, someone e-mail me a sandvich! When is someone going to make a multiplayer Seinfield RPG game ? I want be Krammer with his special abilities “Slide through closed door, Spaz out, and racist rant”
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@ Zyrxil: So what if it was a joke? It was still in there. And if you want to treat that stuff as a joke, why not treat this DLC as a joke as well?
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RPS, you’re harsh on Fallout 3. I think it’s brilliant. Don’t really approve of the DLC though. Bit of an overpriced pisstake, that is.
The voice acting, dialogue and story are horrid beyond belief, but I can grin and bare it because the game itself is a good’un.
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What if after you beat the DLC it turns out that you were just having a radiation induced dream and none of it actaully happened (all the stuff you found ect is gone) but you get a bobble head with an alien’s face that gives you bonus called “Radioactive Hallucination Survivor” Maybe even have the area are your character show signs that you caused a bit of havok while you were having your Hallucination like gutted animals or explosive marks on the ground?
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Serondal: What if there were FARTYPANTS! They’re, like irradiated pants you can find on post-apocalyptic clotheslines around the waste, and when you put them on, you can FART PEOPLE TO DEATH WITH RADIATION! It would be totally cool and people could just not wear them if they didn’t like the idea.
Also: mutant clowns! On pogo sticks!
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I just noticed, the shape of the alien vessel in the first picture strongly reminds me of the shape of one of the Kilrathi fighters from Privateer (Don’t know about the wing commander games, never played those).
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I actually like the farty pants idea, but that much power would have to be counter acted by a huge penalty for wearing them (getting iradiated constantly and obviously never being able to have children)
As far as mutant clowns on pogo sticks I hate you for saying that! I’m deathly afraid of mutant clowns thanks to having been forced to watch Killer Clowns of Outspace when I Was a child and you bringing up those horirble memories is probably going to ruin my life for about a month. GOOD JOB !
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Really frustrated that they aren’t releasing this on DVD since I’m under 18 and therefore can’t buy it off Marketplace. And there’s no way I’m shelling out for the game of the year edition after buying the collectors’ edition and the first add-on pack.
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Yeah! But could fight off the clowns with RADIOACTIVE CUSTARD PIES, because being ZANY is AWESOME and TOTALLY THE SAME as a subtle undercurrent of loving parody/reference to a genre which now looks quite silly due to the passage of time!
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Am I the only one who found FO3 too serious in comparison to the previous games? The previous games, especially the second, were gloriously excessive and tongue in cheek, even without the “joke” encounters. The wonderful adventures of Jonny “The Blade” of Arroyo, Made Man, champion boxer, porn star, how I miss those days. FO3 seems terribly po-faced in comparison.
Fallout 4: New Reno, anyone? :)
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Meh, Bethesda have stayed closer to the Fallout theme than Fallout 2 managed, and they’ve actually did something with the 50′s B movie theme which got sadly neglected in the previous games. In fact, the only real divergence is the absence of the Wild West feel (for obvious reasons).
As for the Aliens being a joke, they’re referenced in both the previous Fallout games and BoS, so they’re already part of the setting one way or the other. Crashed Federation shuttles on the other hand …
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Say what you will LionsPhil , but Im currently modding Fartypants into my game and while I’ll be happily farting at people you’re still going to be brooding becaus a DLC you probably won’t even pay for is going to have aliens. (which from the look of the screen shots above will look very serious and not radioactive clown like at all)
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The point’s probably been made, but wacky alien invasion fits perfectly with the wacky 50′s style of every fallout ever made. So not quite sure what the fuss is about (well I am, but faux naiveity is the new smug disdain).
I’ve put like 50 hours into FO3 and still haven’t got much past finding your dad in the main plot. Must get back to it, with some mods…
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Finally some empirical evidence that there are at least a few professional game writers who don’t particularly care about Fallout 3.
As this comment section shows, the game has certainly received a very mixed response from the core gaming audience, and it’s been slightly weird to see the amount of critical praise which has been heaped on a game which many of us feel is both uninspired, simplistic and needlessly derivative (it’s all especially confusing for people like me who generally don’t accept the reductionistic mantra that all reviewers are “biased” (whatever that means) and buy into “the hype” too easily). At least the quaintly PC-centric nerds running this site are jaded and grumpy enough to fail to get excited by this particular Bethesda action RPG…
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@ Dominic White
Cool, thanks for the recommendation! :)
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@Vinraith: Honestly, I think you very much are trying to be a pain, but I’ll try explaining it anyway. The shooty bits in the metro system were a bit crap, but they tended to be on the way to somewhere interesting, to progress the plot, to solve a quest, several of them had mini quests within, some had no hostiles (they were undoubtedly the weakest aspect of the game anyway). They also fitted the setting. It’s a post apocalyptic game, a wasteland.. a ruined city, civilisation post collapse. I’m not trying to protect the great Fallout name here as Fallout 3 is pretty much removed from the other two in any number of ways, but it had its setting and sense of place nailed pretty damn well. It had some 50′s kitsch, references, music, yeah.. but thats a fairly flimsy line to draw from wasteland survival to wacky 50′s alien abduction b-movie.
A big spaceship straight out of the latter half of Duke Nukem, Quake 2, hell any number of FPSs doesn’t really fit with the rest of the game at all, reguardless of whether you think its awesome or not. It just screams ‘Hey guys, we ran out of ideas so… uh.. lets just put them in a spaceship or something and make them shoot things. Spaceships are cool, right?’.
Hopefully you can understand that, which ultimately boils down to what I said before only with a lot more words.
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BigJonno: I thought I read something about New Vegas…
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Have Bethesda started making RPGs again yet? Cos if not count me very uninterested.
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*make that disinterested
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Well, let’s give this a chance, shall we? I remember how people bashed Fallout 3 BEFORE it was released. It is the same thing again.
And the DLC hasn’t been bad at all. Why would they get it so wrong now? I know it’s a bit like jumping the shark, but those who said that Fallout is about post-apocalypse mixed with a B-Movie 50′s feeling are totally right.
If it wasn’t a bit over the top, then it wouldn’t be Fallout.
I’m sure it will be quite fun and will give great possibilities for modders.
Now, what I would really like is a DLC that is not based on combat, but in solving quest by dialogue, finding secret objects, getting married, being a salesman in the Wasteland, participating in competitions. Something that could make you feel more like living in a community. Something more RPG and less FPS. Now that would make it a much better game.
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I have a little off-topic question.
Does Broken Steel really end the game or the DLC just ends and you go back to the wastelands like always?.
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There’s only so much you can do to the gameplay. Check out the Finally Turn Based mod that, while extremely impressive, plays like its held together with bubble gum and masking tape.
And I think a prevailing feeling among Fallout fans is “Why bother?” Even if you fix the gameplay, the lazy use of the setting and awful story/dialogues make it a lost cause.
BUT if you do happen to browse fallout3nexus, you’ll see that the most robust section is “Gameplay Effects and Changes” with many many of those dedicated to classic-ifying the game as best as possible.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Bethesda don’t get what made Fallout 1 & 2 great – it was the hinted-at nature of these things that made them a brilliant part of the flavour of the Fallout universe (Elvis photo near the crashed Fallout 1 UFO anyone?).
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50′s Steampunk = Dieselpunk
see http://www.sillof.com/C-Sw-1942.htm
As for fallout someday i’ll have time and patience enough.
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@Nick
It seems like you’re fundamentally assuming that because most games taking place on alien ships recently have been FPS’s, this must also be purely an FPS. I think I’ll withhold judgement on that.
As to the setting, I’ve already made it pretty clear why I don’t think there’s any problem there, but you’re welcome to your opinion.
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This actually looks kind of fun. I just can’t go to the bother of dealing with MS points though.
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@Nick
I fail to see what you’re getting at when you pick on Vinraith. I don’t think of it in terms of “befits the setting” or not, I think, “is this new?” and the answer is no. Nothing Bethesda has done with the license, writing-wise, was original or inspired.
They had a great opportunity to create something new with the setting and what they came out with was quite literally a succession of derivative diversions playing like a theme park of the original.
While they nailed the setting, the tone is tangential because they failed the story. No reason why you can’t make a sober Fallout or an FPS Fallout or whatever; it’s the writing that ties it all together.
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@Nick: Aye, New Vegas. Original devs, sort-of, ish, a bit. Will be interesting to see where that goes, if it goes.
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The problem with New Vegas is that it’s tied directly back into Fallout 3. So it’s not like this is the game Obsidian would have made all along if it had gotten the Fallout license to begin with.
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Not to be an ass, but since Obsidian became Obsidian their track record has been less than overwhelming. I have high hopes for New Vegas, but if Obsidian HAD gotten the FO license in lieu of Bethsoft I half wonder if we’d have gotten NWN2 with guns.
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We’d probably have gotten something extremely close to Van Buren or Arcanum– top down, with the ability to choose between Realtime w/ Pause and Turn Based. Probably polygonal with a fully rotatable camera MotB or Drakensang-style.
Obviously they’d have had problems selling the idea of a fully turn based game to a big name publisher because big name publishers are idiots.
Oh, and we probably wouldn’t have a stupid mars attacks DLC.
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Nothing can ever compete with imagined perfect games, that’s for sure.
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No, my imagined perfect Fallout game would be made by Troika-Obsidian Ltd.
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Then you’re DEFINITELY better off with your imagination.
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Definitely looking forward to this, I didn’t think the game would necessarily go in this direction, but then I didn’t expect the setting of ‘Point Lookout’ either, and I was pleasantly surprised…
Strange how much Fallout 3 hate is here, it’s one of the better games I’ve played in the last year or so, with a big finely crafted world to explore and some really creative ideas. If you choose to reject it in principle just because of some poor animations and a few bad lines of dialogue, more power to you I suppose…
I’m also surprised that so many object to aliens in a game that has giant ants straight out of ‘Them!’ and the monster of ‘Creature from the black lagoon’, not to mention laser blasters that turn enemies into a smoking pile of dust. Much of Fallout 3 is tongue and cheek, with a playful 50′s SF vibe, it’s not a game adaptation of ‘The Road’.
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Well regardless, Fallout 3 has made sure we’ll not see anything like that again.
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“it’s not a game adaptation of ‘The Road’.”
It’s not a game adaptation of the bastard child of “Red Dwarf” and “Mars Attacks!”, either. Unless I’ve been playing the wrong game series ever since the ’90s.
Is it really possible that people can’t tell between a joke and something that’s told jokingly on ocasion? Much like Fallout 3, Bioshock had a more serious setting and tone but that didn’t prevent it from using irony or humor. And much like the easter egg in Bioshock that references Pacman, these are expressions of the developer’s culture – not of the game’s own virtual culture.
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Ahhh… Fallout 3. I wanted to enjoy it, but ended up forcing myself to play it. Unfortunately, because I loved the idea of playing the original game and then getting all the DLC over time.
I really love post-apocalyptic settings and stuff, I even liked Oblivion to a certain degree, but FO3… well, I don’t hate it (I don’t *hate* games at all), but it left me quite disappointed. I was intrigued by the intro, you growing up in the vault and all that. But the combat system became a major showstopper for me. Neither rock-solid FPS nor tactical “AP-based” combat, I never felt comfortable with the shooting part, and the talky bits were simply not enough to keep me playing.
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Nalano: I’m not sure why responding to his questions is picking on him, but whatever.
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Vinraith: I’m not assuming it will be FPS without any evidence, I read the press release and looked at the screenshots, there is also the precident of a pure combat DLC that they set already. Ok, so it says ally yourself with wasteland and earths past characters, but I can’t see what thats going to achieve beyond having Elvis in it.
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I’m glad RPS wasn’t grabbed by Fallout 3 – very concerned for your safety. Its reassuring that not only NMA, DAC et al where underwhelmed by Bethsoft’s effort.
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It’s probably a little late to be posting this, but:
Did anyone else find the video game community’s response to Fallout 3 as baffling as I did? Every aspect of its production — plotting, writing, acting, graphic design — would be totally unacceptable outside of video games’ media ghetto. Even compared to other video games, it’s deeply mediocre: an awkward, sluggish combat system; weightless movement; atrocious mouse code. Yet IIRC the lowest metacritic score is somewhere around 80.
The best explanation I can see is that most gamers just really enjoy open world, numbers-go-up and heads-explode power fantasies and are willing to overlook all kinds of things while they play them: the MMORPG effect.
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I like the game and I don´t like MMO´s
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I have all the DLC’s for FO3 to date and I must say they are getting better and better. OA seemed to fill some gaps in terms gear, but had no real story. Pitt had a great story and location, but was pretty short. BS adds to the game more cohesively and is much larger in scope than the other two. Point Lookout is even larger than BS if you really look at it. It has an open environment multiple lengthy quests, and some good new gear. BS and PL are both worth $10… the other two… maybe $7 or $5. I assume Zeta is going to be just as good as PL…. I hope.
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JDC, or maybe just maybe those of us who liked the game realize that it had flaws but the sheer depth and enjoyment the game provided (and allowed the community to provide) made the game greater than the sum of it’s parts.
If you didn’t like a media (be it movie, game or music) that is fine, but daring to presume that your opinion on it’s quality is somehow right, and that everyone who liked it is by default dumber, or has worse taste than you just makes you an arrogant jerk of the highest calibre.
Tossing about terms like mediocre, media ghetto and the MMORPG effect only makes YOU look like an idiot.
More so, it’s the general attitude of people like you (which if I’m reading the tone of your text wrong I apologize for including you in that, but I doubt I am) that annoys me. People who think that their opinion on a subjective object (such as the merits of an artist creation) makes them better, smarter or more cultured.
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”.
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.
Fallout 1 and 2 were crap, 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.
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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)
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Whenever I read “brother” (in the “buddy/pal context) it always sounds like hulk hogan is saying it…
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Great, now I do too.
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I spelled Amen wrong too so I duno what Ahem brother :P alls I know is the Hulkamania is gonna run wild over you!
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I don’t which is worse—Starky’s trolling, or Serondal’s agreement.
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@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?
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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
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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.
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@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.
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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.
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@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.
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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.
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If I didn’t hate Brits with a deep-seated, generations-long passion, Starky would be my new favorite poster.
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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)?
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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.
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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
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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.
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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”.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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/puts you in a box.
@Starky
Yes, yes it would.
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But can I get armour for my horse?
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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.
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