Thread: Fallout: 3 *wo0t*

Mods completely change the way the game is played, especially the ones that rebalance stats, skills, perks, and other things like that. The one I'm playing ensures you can still die in one hit from even the lowliest little raider even while running around in power armor... no more wading into combat with guns blazing and just laughing at everyone.

Exploration aside, I found the vanilla game pretty boring by level 18 because combat was mostly a game of "sigh, more people to kill before I can go back to enjoying a blown-out building", even on very hard. With mods running, even raiders are a threat if I'm caught off guard or playing stupid. Using cover, long-range weapons, and mines is absolutely necessary to succeed against larger groups.

Plus there's something really fun about laying a minefield near a doorway and watching raiders get blown to bits trying to reach you while you're off looting boxes

Save your fucking money. Don't support Bethesda or anyone that shit company's associated with. They completely destroyed all the fun in the Fallout series.

In the vanilla game, by time you hit 15-16, all challenge is gone. By that point, you're swimming in money, ammo, and medkits, so there's no challenge left. There's some basic kind of fun in the act of exploration, but even then the gameworld itself is fairly stale and boring, and when the combat sucks, what's the fucking point? Why not just play fucking Myst if you want a game that's exploration and nothing else? Vanilla fucking console-ized everything to shit so that the retard assfucks that plague console gaming could understand shit, and then they added in skillbooks and all kinds of other shit just to make it so that they can feel important and powerful since you can have maxed stats and skills by fucking level 16. No fucking challenge whatsoever, even on the hardest difficulty setting.

So that leaves mods to make up for the horrific lack of mid-late game challenge in Fallout 3, and apparently the Gamebryo engine (or maybe just BethSoft's use of it for FO3) is completely fucking terrible about being stable when mods are being used. Crashes to desktop every 30-45 minutes, and occasionally some completely fucking game-breaking bugs. I literally got stuck in an area with no available exit because the item I needed to possess to fix the elevator control panel wasn't there. You can't fast-travel out of the area (since it's considered a "dungeon"), and the elevator is literally the only way to exit the building after a certain point. My last backup save that wasn't in that area was 2 gameplay hours ago, and I'll be damned if I'm going to erase two hours of work and effort because some shitfuck area developer couldn't understand why making an area with only one exit that requires a fucking special item to exit is a horrible idea.

So, you can either play the vanilla version of the game and be bored by time you get halfway through it, or you can use inherently unstable mods to make the gameplay interesting and horrifically buggy.

I should have fucking learned my lesson from Oblivion. Oblivion was the exact same shit - fun until you reach about the halfway point of the game's leveling process, at which point it becomes a pointless bullshit existence of wandering around, desperately seeking challenges (which are no longer present.) This makes two games that I want my money back from, both from Bethesda Software.

Save your $50, and save your fucking time. Fallout 3 is worth neither, even if you're a fan of the series like me.

That was my biggest issue out of both oblivion and fallout as well, not enough late game challenge. I also filled that hole with mods, but my game doesn't seem to crash as much as yours does.

I played through FO3 recently, took me about 30 hours to finish the main story with a few side missions. All of a sudden I just don't care anymore, even though I still haven't even seen 90% of the map. I enjoyed the story mode a lot, but have no motivation to run around exploring and picking up other random crap for no reason. For all the bad raps that "linear" storylines get, I'd be happier if the linear story covered more of the world map and took longer to complete.

I don't have a lot of free time to game, and it almost always goes to TF2. FO3 briefly distracted me, but only because of the story. Now that the story is over, when I have my 2 hours to game one night, I am much more likely to get in TF2 and play a real skill based e-sport/game, rather than dick around in the wastelands killing the same mutants over and over to try to get more pointless stats.

That was my issue with vanilla FO3, definitely. For the first 10-12 levels (about 8-12 hours for me, playing on very hard) I was having an absolute blast, and if I were to write a review of the game based on just those first 8-12 hours, I'd rate it a solid 9/10. There were lots of side quests to be done, lots of fun exploration, and still plenty of the main quest to take care of.

But by time you hit 15+ in the vanilla game, it stops being challenging, and you've probably explored most of the areas worth exploring. Remember, I was playing as a melee character that didn't use Sneak at all, and I was playing exclusively on very hard, where enemies do double damage. I never once died, and never really came close, either. Every fight consisted of me literally just running up to my enemies and hacking away until they died, and repeating this until my weapon broke, at which point I'd stop my rampage and go back to Megaton to have it repaired, then repeat the process. It wasn't challenging, really... it was just annoying.

The drive to explore starts getting weaker and weaker when you realize every building is mostly the same copy-pasted textures and doodads filled with the same copy-pasted super mutants, feral ghouls, or raiders.

Mods definitely extend the life of the game - I got about an extra 28 hours worth from the Fallout Wanderers Edition modpack before running into the fatal game-breaker bug that caused me to quit, and it was pretty fun. But, as mentioned, introducing mods inevitabily introduces bugs. I was only using two mods specifically designed to work together (along with a UI mod that came recommended by both) and I still ran into frequent crashes to desktop and other assorted strangeness.

It's a sad day when you have to turn to a mod in order to get a challenge out of a game