Fallout 3 Reviews, IGN 9.6

[Harv]

http://pc.ign.com/articles/924/924346p1.html


It's rare that a game can hit the mark in so many different and often conflicting areas. Fallout 3 offers freedom without sacrificing a focused story. It delivers fantastic combat without forgoing a deep role-playing system. The characters you meet are engaging and oftentimes hilarious without feeling out of place in this harsh world. The game has a few flaws -- most of them technical -- but it's a case where the whole is greater than the sum. It's a fantastic game with incredible atmosphere that offers fun in so many different ways that you're almost sure to get hooked. This is one of the best games you'll play this year.


Mine arrives today! :D

[Young Al Capone]

The only thing more effective is pick-pocketing a raider and leaving a hand-grenade in place of the stolen item.

Wait, what did he just say?

Fuck, and I was planning on skipping this until later this year, maybe early next year.

[Ancalagon]

I think I'll order this on Friday to arrive on Saturday (I'm in the UK so its only released on Friday). I could get it delivered on Friday, but I'm going to movies on Friday night to see Quantum of Solace so I dont want to bring it with.

[Squidbot]

I wouldn't skip it, YAC, I expect many to say this is GOTY. For me Fable 2 just beats it, but only just.

[President Fred]

This sounds really good, I am sort of holding out for more reviews. It sounds like I will be ordering this on steam this weekend.

[Young Al Capone]

I wouldn't skip it, YAC, I expect many to say this is GOTY. For me Fable 2 just beats it, but only just.

It looks pretty good these days, and sounds good too. I was just so underwhelmed by the E3 videos that I went into completely ignoring it mode. I am a huge fan of the first two, so the videos were very dissapointing to me.

Plus, all of my time is currently being devoted to Far Cry 2, and what about Fable 2?

...and I need a new job, 28 days until I am layed off.

[NoName]

Ug, half my posts these days are me whining about not having enough time to play all the games I want to at once.

This post continues this theme. This is next on my list after LBP. Hopefully sooner than later.

[Young Al Capone]

You can also wander into some areas with enemies that will simply slaughter you.

This is good.

As you progress, the enemies will get tougher along with you, though you'll still run into some low-level baddies that your improved character can simply slaughter.

This makes me wonder and a bit worried. Like a JRPG where the world gets tougher as you make progress and find new areas, or like Oblivion where the world levels with you?

Even as a tease, it gives Fallout 3 grounding in reality that many RPGs lack (I've never understood why some RPGs have progression where each new town you visit has slightly better equipment than the one prior).

Huh? So I take it the world levels with you.

[Poewan]

Im really torn on which version to get for this game : PC or consoles? I know that my PC is powerful enough to handle this at full details, and im probably going to get better graphics that way, but on the other hand, wont the experience be better on a 42" HDTV with my nice sound system cranked up? ARGH!! So many descisions!!

[Young Al Capone]

Im really torn on which version to get for this game : PC or consoles? I know that my PC is powerful enough to handle this at full details, and im probably going to get better graphics that way, but on the other hand, wont the experience be better on a 42" HDTV with my nice sound system cranked up? ARGH!! So many descisions!!

PC for the mods, if this is anything like Oblivion in the mod department than the mods could make the game so superior on PC.

[National Kato]

Once you finish Fallout 3 and view the ending, you're booted back to the main menu. You'll have to load up a prior save if you want to continue exploring with that character.

The above is an interesting departure from the Elder Scrolls mold. I'm not sure whether I'm in favor of it or not...I'm sure future DLC/expansions will open up your old saves again, but it warrants remembering that you shouldn't finish the main plot until you're absolutely sure you want to.

Also, the IGN review states that the number of side quests is small. They still say 40 hours for the main game and possible 100 for extra exploring, but I wonder how much of that is exploring time and not actual quest time?

[Squidbot]

It looks pretty good these days, and sounds good too. I was just so underwhelmed by the E3 videos that I went into completely ignoring it mode. I am a huge fan of the first two, so the videos were very dissapointing to me.

Plus, all of my time is currently being devoted to Far Cry 2, and what about Fable 2?

...and I need a new job, 28 days until I am layed off.

I'm a fan of Fallout 1&2, and while 3 is an excellent game in its own right I am not sure I can say it is a worthy succesor. It's a fantastic RPG, huge scope, wonderful customization, heaps of quests and the feel of the game is certainly remarkably similar to the firt two, but it just doesn't seem to be quite as huge in its breadth.

[TheFlyingOrc]

Ug, half my posts these days are me whining about not having enough time to play all the games I want to at once.

This post continues this theme. This is next on my list after LBP. Hopefully sooner than later.

Why would you play through LBP "first"? If anything, the game's only going to be better if you wait 3 months to play it.

[Young Al Capone]

I'm a fan of Fallout 1&2, and while 3 is an excellent game in its own right I am not sure I can say it is a worthy succesor. It's a fantastic RPG, huge scope, wonderful customization, heaps of quests and the feel of the game is certainly remarkably similar to the firt two, but it just doesn't seem to be quite as huge in its breadth.

What I was most impressed by was the unpredictable nature of the first two. Those were games where you could lay plans and be extremely prepared and still have everything go awry and not be able to salvage the situation. They are some of the only RPGs where I play hardcore and never reload unless I die, and always live with the consequences of what I have done or what has been done to me because you never know how things will play out. Events from way earlier in the game can bite you in the ass later, and then on the next play through not happen at all. It was amazing and I worry that they didn't capture that aspect of the games at all.

It still looks good, but I wish they would have called it anything else.

[Hotcod]

This makes me wonder and a bit worried. Like a JRPG where the world gets tougher as you make progress and find new areas, or like Oblivion where the world levels with you?

Huh? So I take it the world levels with you.

It's a mix, there are areas that won't level and areas that will as far as i know... so you are always faced with a challenge but you you do get to go back and kill easy things and run in to places your really not meant to be and so on

[Squidbot]

By the way, Eurogamer (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=270173) gave it 10.

It's a mix, there are areas that won't level and areas that will as far as i know... so you are always faced with a challenge but you you do get to go back and kill easy things and run in to places your really not meant to be and so on

That's correct.

[NoName]

Why would you play through LBP "first"? If anything, the game's only going to be better if you wait 3 months to play it.

.... You and your logic.

[sparkfizt]

I doubt fallout 3 could ever satisfy the die-hard fallout fans. To take something viewed with extreme levels of rose tinted goggles and attempt to branch would be fairly impossible. Quite simply modern game design does not produce games where you can screw yourself as royally as could in the past. Generally people get mad at making a bad being forced to either load or restart, and as such most modern games keep you from being able to do this.

They could have stuck another name on the game, but I'm sure they really wanted to work with the IP rather than end up with a game that is in the fallout world with a name change.

[Scull]

This is the only game I'm going to be buying for myself for the rest of the year. Honestly, this game could have been the only game I bought for the whole year and have been satisfied with it. It is a great game.

[Hotcod]

Damn the reviews are making me really really want to play it. I've some what been keeping my excitement down for this but it's sooooo close now sooooooooo close!

[Virtual Machine]

I doubt fallout 3 could ever satisfy the die-hard fallout fans. To take something viewed with extreme levels of rose tinted goggles and attempt to branch would be fairly impossible. Quite simply modern game design does not produce games where you can screw yourself as royally as could in the past. Generally people get mad at making a bad being forced to either load or restart, and as such most modern games keep you from being able to do this.

They could have stuck another name on the game, but I'm sure they really wanted to work with the IP rather than end up with a game that is in the fallout world with a name change.

This i can totally get behind. I'm one of these guys who plowed through Fallout 1 & 2 multiple times from '97 to '99, and was brutally disappointed by both iterations of "Brotherhood of Steel", and going back to the first two games over the last 12 months was something of a chore for me. I actually found the games pretty dull. Fallout 3 has been amazing so far, and does a phenomenal job of keeping the setting alive, while introducing a little more dark drama into the whole thing. There are moments of the game that are downright creepy, and there are computer logs and such that will have you keeling over in laughter or shocked. It's an amazing piece of work, every bit as worthy of the name as unchecked nostalgia thinks the first two are.

I hope the end game is as good as the first - most people don't seem to remember that Fallout 2 shat itself in the final act.

[Squidbot]

For those who have it, and chose to be a bit of a nasty bastard...

If you blow up Megaton be sure to go back to the remains for a good laugh.

[Telefrog]

Giantbomb gives it a 4 out of 5 (http://www.giantbomb.com/fallout-3/61-20504/reviews/).


Across the three platforms, the PC version of Fallout 3 is the best, provided you have hardware that can handle it. The PC version has better lighting, a bit more graphical detail, and just looks better, overall. It's a Games For Windows Live game, too, so if you're dead set on playing the game with an Xbox 360 controller, you can do that on the PC, as well. Additionally, it has achievements, just like the 360 version, though they're kept separately--this means you could technically double up, play the game to completion on both the 360 and the PC, and have double the points as a result.


The 360 version is no slouch, though. It might not be quite as pretty as the PC version, but it still looks fine. The load times remain pretty reasonable. The PlayStation 3 version is below the 360 version, by comparison. The level of detail when you're in the wasteland or other areas where you can see for great distances isn't quite as good, the game seems to be a bit more aliased, and the frame rate isn't as smooth. Plus, the PS3 version of the game doesn't have any trophy support (yet), and the game actually freezes every time a status message, such as "so and so is online" or "DUDE HOW DID U GET FALLOUT 3 EARLY!!!!???" is on-screen. That's bad enough to make you want to log out of the PlayStation Network before booting up the PS3 version of the game.


It's unfortunate that Fallout 3 is saddled with so many little- and medium-sized issues, because they get in the way of what's an otherwise fantastic experience. The world is well-realized and full of options. It'll be a struggle in spots, but I'm willing to guess that most people will be able to overlook a lot of the game's problems and still have a very good time exploring the irradiated wasteland formerly known as Washington DC.

[RandoM51]

I doubt fallout 3 could ever satisfy the die-hard fallout fans.

It doesn't satisfy me as a Fallout fan, an RPG fan, or as a gamer in the year 2008. Here's why:

In previous Fallout games I always had a sense that my character actions/decisions were very important. Ten levels into this game I'm not getting the same feel, I don't care about any of the NPCs, I don't identify for/against any of the factions, etc. Fallout 3 just doesn't do as good a job as the previous games with maintaining a cohesive storyline that pushes the game forward.

In previous fallout games whenever you came to dealing with NPCs there were almost always more than one skill-based dialog path. Most of the time with fallout3 you'll get a speechcraft option and a couple regular options.

Fallout 3 suffers from the same "feature" that Oblivion did, namely that most of the encounters autolevel either upwards or downwards to match that of your character. Consequently I saw and killed both super mutants and Brotherhood of Steel npcs(who happened to be in power armor while I was in a vault 101 jumpsuit). I got power armor at level 3... and it was just barely better than my jumpsuit. I couldn't use it without the proper training, of course. Thing is, that goes completely against Fallout's traditional gameplay. In the earlier games if you jumped into the deep end of the pool before your character was ready you died quickly and messily. In fallout3 there is no deep end of the pool, it is just one big kiddie pool.

Lastly, the game is on the ancient Gamebryo engine, which quite honestly looks like crap compared to most other modern games, particularly in the wake of great looking games like Warhead, FC2, Dead Space, etc. It does a decent job with terrain but it is horrible with models and animation. Switch to 3rd person view while running down the stairs in Megaton if you want to have a good laugh.

For a game that has very little of what made Fallout great and a lot of Oblivion's weak points I'm kind of amazed it is reviewing so well. I guess I'll just chalk it up to people being starved for Sci-Fi RPG games.

[Telefrog]

It doesn't satisfy me as a Fallout fan, an RPG fan, or as a gamer in the year 2008. Here's why:

I can't argue objectively about your opinion on the gameplay and your dissatisfaction with the Gamebryo engine, but here's an interesting article (http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/10/fallout-3.html) regarding Fallout presented to modern student video game players and their reactions to it.


So when I handed them Fallout (half played the original, half the sequel) with no instructions or special preparation, they struggled. A lot. They had the original manuals, but almost nobody read them. After exiting the vault, they had no idea where to go or what to do. Their movements were limited for no apparent reason; "action points" made no sense; and they died within minutes nearly everywhere they went.

A few early posts from our online forum:

Idk if anyone else has this problem but I am having a hard time getting anything done... I started as Max Stone hopin to kill some things and level up... but there isn't much 2 kill... the redscorpians are owning me... Any way to move like a little bit quicker?

I kept walking back and forth between 15 and 13 and get stopped by travelers... they took me to a town where I forgot to save and got dominated and lost all my experience and time...

i have enough to fire a gun and kill a scorpion, but then i'm only 1 action point short to use a weapon and i get screwed because i can't fight back...how do i gain more action points and why do they randomly go away when i'm fighting?

I'm terrible about reading manuals and whatnot, so it took me forever to find out how to rest because the pipboy doesn't work originally and I didn't try it again until I clicked it by accident. So far, I appreciated being left to my own devices, but because the game is so old, with the graphics it has and whatnot, it sometimes is hard to recognize what needs to be done. Like it's only after you play a game like this that you realize how much easier having glowing objects of interest is.


Our first Fallout conversation was a disaster. Few students had posted on the forum as I had asked them to, and it was obvious that almost no one had devoted much time to playing. They basically tried the game, got frustrated, threw up their hands, and walked away. Our midterm break began the following day, so I told them I expected them to continue playing over the break, be resourceful, roll up their sleeves, and figure it out. "Somewhere in there," I assured them, "is the best RPG you will play this semester. If you dig harder to find it, I promise you will thank me." A bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but I meant it.


Long story short? Fallout 1 and 2 are both very unfriendly games. They're plain not marketable to a general audience in this day and age. Not only are the graphics bad to modern gamers, but the punishing gameplay is almost insurmountable without guidance.

I played through Fallout 2 again last year, and I had completely forgotten how difficult the game is to play starting out without a manual on my lap.

[Young Al Capone]

That article ends with the students thinking that it won't be a good Fallout game, and most finding something about the game that the enjoyed or were at least interested in playing more to see the result.

Then, during the break, something broke. I began to notice increased activity in the discussion forum, which soon turned into a small flurry of posts. A sampling:

What is interesting about the random encounters in the game is that not all of them are hostile encounters. The kind of encounter that is very rare in games is the neutral encounter where you encounter people fighting. You can help either side but even then sometimes they will just turn around and attack you when they beat whoever they were fighting. My favorite way to deal with these encounters is to wait till a few of them die, and then it's looting corpses time. It’s amazing what kind of nice loot you can find on them. It’s also where I got my first gun.

Think about it, they have almost myths of what we know about these people and things. They don't know everything and have to rely on what they do know. I'm really interested in seeing how much information is lost because of the isolation caused by the vaults.

That's an interesting idea. What effect would the isolation of the vaults have on the society? And what would changed based on the nuclear apocalypse? It would be like taking all the data in the world and deleting random parts. It would cause mass chaos, especially once the original humans (from pre-nuking) die out. Or, alternatively, there could be a safe-haven somewhere. From a developing standpoint, how could that effect the game? Could it?

I just found out that the greeter at the Den tells you to be vewy vewy quiet he is hunting rabbits, and i just stopped and laughed for about fifteen mins.

Suddenly, they got Fallout. They grokked the mechanics and embraced the non-linear gameplay. They made peace with uncertainty. But more importantly, they built a relationship with the character and the offbeat but perilous world. As Iroquois Pliskin points out in an essay I shared with my students:

And so this feeling of vulnerability that Fallout inspires is apt, because it does what good games do: it uses mechanics and gameplay rules to create a sense of character. All the aimlessness and danger make you feel dislocated, out of your element, and this is exactly how your protagonist must feel after emerging from a life of tight-knit isolation from the outside world. You feel like you share an experience with your character, this experience of being thrust into a world you barely understand, one that is unpredictable and promising at once; and sharing an experience is the beginning of a relationship.

But this takes time. Fallout doesn't greet you with a getting-to-know-you opening level or a hand-holding tutorial. My students were willing - granted, at my insistence - to keep plugging away, and they were richly rewarded for their efforts. It's nice to be right. I may have even gained back the credibility I lost with Planetfall (which is a great game no matter what they say!)

And so we met again this morning. After a long and productive conversation I asked them how they were feeling about Fallout 3. "They're totally gonna screw up that game," said one student. "They're gonna say shoot this guy in the eyeball, like they're giving you all these choices, but you know they're gonna make it run and gun. You're gonna be running around blowing stuff up, and all the shooter players are gonna love it. But it won't be Fallout. I promise you. It won't be Fallout." "It looks pretty amazing," observed another, "and it should be fun. But yeah, it probably won't be Fallout."

Among the zealous converts, Fallout traditions die hard.

Are they hard to market to a broad audience, I don't necessarily think so, games with so much choice are popular these days. Sure, they are unforgiving but they also reward well thought out choices. Maybe they cannot reach as large of an audience but there is certainly an audience there.

Plus, there is no reason why there cannot be an earlier starter zone like near the vault, or a tutorial.

[Telefrog]

That article ends with the students thinking that it won't be a good Fallout game, and most finding something about the game that the enjoyed or were at least interested in playing more to see the result.

Are they hard to market to a broad audience, I don't necessarily think so, games with so much choice are popular these days. Sure, they are unforgiving but they also reward well thought out choices. Maybe they cannot reach as large of an audience but there is certainly an audience there.

Plus, there is no reason why there cannot be an earlier starter zone like near the vault, or a tutorial.

Sure the article ends on a positive note. The majority of the students did eventually get it and turn around. They were, however, students forced to keep playing by their teacher. I'm pretty sure that had he not "encouraged" them, they would've "got frustrated, threw up their hands, and walked away."

I disagree that you could successfully market a game as unforgiving and actively hostile to newbies as Fallout to a general audience in this day and age. I think a hardcore gamer group would certainly buy it, (I would) but I doubt it would get the penetration that a modern AAA budget needs to succeed.

Look at EVE or the X3 series of games. They're successful in their niche audience spaces, but they'll never get traction in the general "console" demographic. That's fine, if as a publisher/developer, you're properly budgeted and have the apporpriate expectations of that product, but it wouldn't fly outside of that.

[KingGorilla]

This sounds really good, I am sort of holding out for more reviews. It sounds like I will be ordering this on steam this weekend.
I should have mine in a month.

I would not begrudge anyone waiting until January for this one. You need to dedicate a month or two to just playing this.

[RandoM51]

Long story short? Fallout 1 and 2 are both very unfriendly games. They're plain not marketable to a general audience in this day and age. Not only are the graphics bad to modern gamers, but the punishing gameplay is almost insurmountable without guidance.

I played through Fallout 2 again last year, and I had completely forgotten how difficult the game is to play starting out without a manual on my lap.

Even shorter version of the story? Put in difficulty levels that mean something and aren't modified by a sliding level scale.

The people who are clueless can still have a zero-challenge game, while those of us who want our games to be games instead of fur-covered plush toys can game.

Lastly, I don't care how broad an audience they wish to reach. By putting the game on PC and both nextgen consoles they've already fucked that one up. Put in on the Wii and make a commercial with two hot chicks sitting on a couch having fun playing Fallout3 with wagglewands: Mission accomplished.

If Americans are getting stupider as time goes by perhaps the answer isn't to make dumber games but to make games that give them a challenge, and then reward them appropriately for overcoming those challenges. Instead of telling them it is ok to be stupid, why not give them some exercise for their brain? They might actually enjoy it and get a few points in their critical thinking skill.

Since when did it become a good idea for everything in life to have training wheels for the inept as a mandatory feature instead of as a bolt-on option?

[Young Al Capone]

Sure the article ends on a positive note. The majority of the students did eventually get it and turn around. They were, however, students forced to keep playing by their teacher. I'm pretty sure that had he not "encouraged" them, they would've "got frustrated, threw up their hands, and walked away."

I disagree that you could successfully market a game as unforgiving and actively hostile to newbies as Fallout to a general audience in this day and age. I think a hardcore gamer group would certainly buy it, (I would) but I doubt it would get the penetration that a modern AAA budget needs to succeed.

Look at EVE or the X3 series of games. They're successful in their niche audience spaces, but they'll never get traction in the general "console" demographic. That's fine, if as a publisher/developer, you're properly budgeted and have the apporpriate expectations of that product, but it wouldn't fly outside of that.

I think a tutorial and a starter zone can make all of the difference. Or difficulty levels that are significant, like RandoM suggested. Like difficulty levels from old games, that actually had explanations of what was changed.

EVE and X3 are both pretty niche titles though, even if they do cater to the hardcore. I certainly consider myself a core gamer, but still found EVE played itself mostly and while X is awesome it is like swimming in the ocean; there are way too many directions you can go and it still feels like you are never getting anywhere. Plus, they aren't marketed to anybody but core gamers, and I am sure that makes a difference.

Really though, it had little to do with the design but rather the ideals. Well thought out narative and world, gameplay that rewards thought out tactics, punishing sloppyness and rushing. It was never the inaccessibilty that was appealing, it was the sense of freedom, importance, and belonging to a world that existed without you and reacted to your actions.

[Telefrog]

If Americans are getting stupider as time goes by perhaps the answer isn't to make dumber games but to make games that give them a challenge, and then reward them appropriately for overcoming those challenges. Instead of telling them it is ok to be stupid, why not give them some exercise for their brain? They might actually enjoy it and get a few points in their critical thinking skill.

Since when did it become a good idea for everything in life to have training wheels for the inept as a mandatory feature instead of as a bolt-on option?

I don't think the audience is getting stupider, I think it's getting broader which understandably includes more people that don't have the patience or tolerance for obtuse design. Video games of our youth were a lot tougher, and they were designed for a certain demographic.

Now, a really tough game with no handholding and no forgiveness for challenges can appeal to a select audience. STALKER, X3, Gary Grigsby games, etc are very successful in their spaces, but only in those limited demographics. As a producer, if that's all you want do - make a great game that makes a specific audience happy - that option is still there within a reasonable budget.

The size of AAA budgets these days prohibit designing games with no regard to the general audience. If you plan on making (corporate-sized) major money in gaming, you have to design towards a general audience. Bethesda did what they had to do to appeal to a broader audience. Let's not kid around here. Oblivion made a Hell of a lot more money than Morrowind, and a lot of that had to do with it's "dumbed down" or broader design.

[Harv]

I can see where Random51 is coming from as the game is significantly easier at the beginning than the original Fallout games, which I loved btw. So far I've really not even come close to dying except when I ran out of ammo for my pistol and had to resort to clubbing people to death.

I can't say for sure if I will love this game the way I did the original games. I do like that the world has been fully realized even if the character models are pretty crappy overall. It would be nice to have more fluid animations.

I haven't encountered the skill level ramp up/down that Random51 talked about, but if that's the case it's a bit silly. I mean in the old game if you wandered into the Military Base at level 3 somehow you would have been blown to bits in about two seconds and that's really the way it should be.

I can't say much more about the game as I'm only at about level 3 at the moment and have only just gone through Megaton.

[RandoM51]

Let's not kid around here. Oblivion made a Hell of a lot more money than Morrowind, and a lot of that had to do with it's "dumbed down" or broader design.

I believe this to be an entirely incorrect assumption. Oblivion made a hell of a lot more money---I don't know that it did on PC---or hey, even at all---but let's just assume you're talking about additional console sales---which happened because of the reputation of Morrowind and Bethesda on pc games, not because they dumbed-down the game, told the world about it and the idiot masses flocked to the dumbed-down product.

Seriously, you do not broaden your market by making your game dumber, you broaden it by marketing it to more people. I could sell Fallout---better yet Wasteland---to your grandmother if you gave me 15 minutes to explain the compelling nature of the experience.

And HEY, i'm not saying do not make a dumbed-down, commercially acceptable, mass-market-appealable game. I'm just asking that you please provide difficulty options in the game settings so that those of us gamers who a) are not retards, b) not products of the mtv generations, and c) want a challenge, can still get that from your game.

Give the masses their training wheels but let us old timers roll without them. :p

[bryan]

While I agree with your wish for more sophisticated games, you're off the mark when you say this:

you broaden it by marketing it to more people.

If the solution was simple, no one would ever bother with niche products, target marketing, etc. You can't expand your customer base just by marketing, it all comes down to the product.

[Widgetcraft]

I wouldn't skip it, YAC, I expect many to say this is GOTY. For me Fable 2 just beats it, but only just.

Same for me; they were both great games, but Fable 2 was a more fun and unique experience.

[Telefrog]

Seriously, you do not broaden your market by making your game dumber, you broaden it by marketing it to more people. I could sell Fallout---better yet Wasteland---to your grandmother if you gave me 15 minutes to explain the compelling nature of the experience.

Would you then sit patiently by her and walk her through the game? :rolleyes: That's really the only way she'd get through it regardless of your awesome sales technique. Then, once she'd given up, I guarantee your marketing job would be a lot harder when dealing with her friends and their friends.

I seriously doubt anyone could successfully market a game like Wasteland to today's audience. Fallout would be slightly easier, thanks to the improved graphics, but it would still be like trying to boil the ocean.

[Deadend]

I think Fallout 3 gets it right. While I miss my turn based combat from the old games, having the first person camera for exploring the world is awesome. Combat is a bit underwhelming, but it's not a FPS game with RPG, it's an RPG with FPS bits.

The game can still be punishingly hard if you set the difficulty up, but it also has tutorials and gives you information so that you don't need to fully read and understand the manual that is extremely thick and comes with a spiral notebook like Fallout 2.

Modern Games are built around the assumption of never touching the manual, ever.

Even though I sitll don't know why Fallout 3 has the tutorial for looking, moving, and jumping. Everyone who would play the game already knows those 3 things.

[MagGnome]

I'll definitely be picking this up early next year. I'm leaning towards PC, even though I won't be able to get the visuals that I would on my 360, simply because my video card is pretty mediocre.

I'm also debating if I want to play through the first two before or after this one. I'm afraid that playing the originals first could ruin this one for me, or vice versa.

[Widgetcraft]

Deadend: What spiral notebook manual? I got the CE, and I don't have anything like that.

[Mashidar]

Sad story really, I had it here today from Gamefly after waiting all week for it to get here, only to have my xbox 360 red ring yesterday morning. Sucks that it had to happen now, and I told myself I can't wait for 3-4 weeks to get my system back in order to play Fallout 3 so I picked up the PC version at work last night.

So far I'm really happy with the game, had a sound issue that would not let me create new games at first, but after I fixed that issue I hooked up my 360 controller, signed in on Games for Windows Live service with my 360 tag and have enjoyed what I've played so far.

Only thing I wish I could do, or perhaps I don't know how is to take a screenshot while playing the game with a 360 controller. Right now if I want to take a screen I have to disable the controller then hit screenshot on the keyboard, then re-enable the controller to keep playing.

It's about what I expected and I"ll have to spend more time exploring and wandering around before I really know what to think of it.

[Young Al Capone]

Deadend: What spiral notebook manual? I got the CE, and I don't have anything like that.

He was talking about the manual for Fallout 2. The first two came with thick manuals that were spiral bound and made to look sort of like manuals for machinery.

[Harv]

I must say that I see now why this game is so highly rated. It has really sucked me in.

[kyrieee]

IGN are ridiculous
They can't control themselves. Reviewing AAA games shouldn't be a contest in who can splooge the most over them. If they were any good at writing they shouldn't need 5-10 pages to say why something is good either

[KingGorilla]

IGN are ridiculous
They can't control themselves. Reviewing AAA games shouldn't be a contest in who can splooge the most over them. If they were any good at writing they shouldn't need 5-10 pages to say why something is good either

Have you ever read a game review before? Or how about a podcast? If I had a dime each time Shane Bettenhausen, Mark McDonald, or Bryan Intihar argues over who was the bigger fan of game X, I woul not need to work. Not to mention how, whether it is admitted or not, advertisers play a mucharger role in the editorial content of most game sites and publications. Mostly because the fear of losing those over-rides the fear or losing integrity(which most of the audience could give a fuck about).