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Fallout 3 DLC Detailed
Eurogamer spoke with Bethesda's Jeff Gardiner about the upcoming downloadable content for Fallout 3. The new gameplay will be bundled into three different segments, the first of which is due this month. The last segment will raise the game's level cap to 30. Gardiner had this to say about how the Strike Teams would work: "The player will be able to choose, from a limited resource pool, what type of team members will accompany him or her on several missions within the simulations. These choices include different troop types like snipers or heavy weapons troops. They'll also be able to make tactical decisions on how to deploy these troops in certain situations. The Chinese Stealth Suit was what I was hinting at last week — it works similar to stealth boy every time you crouch!"
I know it's possibly paranoia but the concept of downloadable content still makes me think they're actively removing things from the original game to release them later as downloadable content.
It's like releasing the Fantastic 3 and then include the invisible girl as downloadable content.
Thanks!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Why would they wait until the last expansion to raise the level cap? While I liked Fallout 3, the fact that I hadn't even started the final mission before I hit the cap was kind of irritating.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
The funny thing is that some of that has been done already by the modders. There is a suit which makes you slightly harder to see when crouched. There is one which gives you 25% chameleon _all_ the time.
Heck, transplanting the Stealth Boy enchantment to a suit of your choosing is such a trivial affair, I had made my very own long before the GECK was released. The FOMM/TESnip already had all you need for that. Turns out someone else already had made the 25% one, so mine was never released, though.
Raising the level to 30? That is one global variable. That was one of the first mods released.
So I'm not really thinking they intentionally cut anything out, because most of it is _trivial_ stuff. Well, there'll be new maps and stuff so obviously it's more than just the items, but the "Ivisible Girl" in your example just made no sense to remove from release because it doesn't save anything at all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you (like me) bought the PS3 version of this game, then consider signing this petition to adding DLC to the PS3 version as well.
So you haven't bothered playing the ending, then?
*SPOILERS INCOMING*
Because, yes, that's what makes him stand out like a sore thumb. He already showed you that he's immune to radiation, and ventured for you in that room in the bunker. But at the Project Purity end scene there is _no_ option to send _him_ into the irradiated room to press the four buttons to activate the installation. You get to choose whether you die or the paladin dies, but there is no freaking option to go, "Hey, Fawkes, you're immune to radiation, right? Can you go in there and press these four numbers for me, please?"
Now I understand the climactic choice and all, but the very presence of Fawkes there spoils it in a major way. Suddenly that choice and sacrifice makes no bloody sense. It's like deciding whether me or you rush some evil guys and take a bullet, while having Superman standing around obliviously watching the whole debate. It makes no sense.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Fallout 3 is a very large game, I certainly don't feel like it wasn't well worth its price. I have no issue with paying a fair price for them to add more. But it isn't the value side that bothers me.
If I buy the DLC on my Xbox it is linked to my console. Not only does that make it impossible for me to sell, it also can be a real pain in the ass getting DLC stuff back if your console breaks or gets stolen. I know why the DLC model exists, I just wish us backwards types could get it on physical media.
It's obvious they were faced with a dillema, fit the basic game + insane number of bugs + extra features all on to the game disc.
Option 1 would have been to ship a bugfree and complete game and then try to charge people later for the usual mass of bugs their games are riddled with.
Option 2 is the obvious choice. Include the stripped down game and the mass of bugs on the initial version. Milk the suckers out of extra cash for access to the complete game with DLC.
Do you ever wonder why your opinion is different to everyone else's? I mean, sure, some people think Fallout 3 sucked, but shit, even Yahtzee thinks it is awesome, and he's paid not to like anything. That's a piss funny video BTW. Feel free to go watch it and come back saying it wasn't funny.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Name the bugs then. I've played hundreds of hours of this game and experienced no crashes. That's more than I can say for any other game I've played lately (except maybe Eve Online, that's probably the most rock solid "game" I've ever played). There's absolutely nothing wrong with using the same engine.. I think more companies should do it. The Oblivion engine is so good that I hope they make a dozen more games using it.
Did you watch the video? It really is funny, honest.
How we know is more important than what we know.
reading through forum posts from people complaining about the insane number of bugs in the game.
Ya know, on the Internet, we have this think call a "hyperlink" that you can use to show someone what you're talking about.
Really, I have no problems with this game. I can't help it. Am I just lucky? Do I just happen to play the game the same way the play testers did?
are turning the console world to crap.
That might be relevant.. I'm playing on a PC.
How we know is more important than what we know.
the bug that causes my xbox 360 to freeze completely, requiring me to turn it off and back on and then it still locks up when I try to restart. grr
And what bugs. What problems. What glitches. Show me, show us. Because I haven't hat a single problem yet ...
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
It's not just the game. It happened about every two game hours on my original (first-run) 360. When the DVD drive finally died, I replaced it, and I haven't seen it happen once in the last 12 hours.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Name the bugs then. I've played hundreds of hours of this game and experienced no crashes.
While I haven't had any really showstopping bugs, the game has crashed on me 4-5 times in my 70 hours of playtime.
Nothing critical though, just close it down and restart, and you're good to go.
The enemy rewards, especially on the high end, were okay, if even a little small. But the quest rewards were huge - often bigger than what you would get for all the enemies you'd face completing that quest.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Its caused my Xbox 360 to lock up, requiring me to turn it off. Its very repeatable every time I try to load that saved game it locks up. I think that is a pretty severe bug. Supposedly there is a work around involving resetting sytem memory. Although this means re-downloading patches for all other games (I think): Go to the Xbox Dashboard, select the System Blade, and select Memory. -Highlight the HD symbol and press Y. - Press X, X, Left Bumper, Right Bumper, X, X.
One I've experienced: NPCs wandering off into the ether or just dying due to a pathfinding glitch. The character Walter (Megaton Water Purification guy) for instance is known to either wander off through a clipping error, or to kill himself by falling off the *top* of Lucas Simms's house. I've personally experienced him disappearing (if I teleported to him with the console, he'd obviously wandered through a clipping error and couldn't get back), and I brought him back through a cheat using the in game console, but it's a really shitty thing to run into in the Xbox/PS3 version, where it can kill off whole plotlines with no recourse. Apparently this is a common error for Walter, along with a number of much more plot critical characters in Megaton (Megaton is particularly bad, due to the level variations; the bad path finding means the characters often kill themselves wandering off a cliff).
I've also had a single crash, but considering how unstable most games are, I'm not complaining too much about that.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
I bought this game during my vacation when I had loads of spare time, but only played for 4 hours and haven't touched it in a week. The game's crashed on me at least 5 times, though thankfully, like Oblivion, it saves every time you walk through a door and zone into a new area.
I quit after getting baffled by the teammate system. I befriended Dogmeat and he was a real asskicker, but then I fast travelled somewhere and never saw him again. 2 hours later, out of the blue, I got a message that said "Dogmeat has died". Alt-F4, never came back.
The lack of polish overall is what's deterring me. For example, in the beginning at your birthday party all the idiotic NPCs talk over eachother and interrupt what they are saying. Also, as I run through the wastelands I agro random enemies from 100 paces so that I always have 2 dogs, a mercenary, and a super mutant chasing me side by side, ignoring eachother. I'm also disappointed by the performance drops during combat on my relatively beefy PC - I get better framerate in Crysis fighting 14 guys in the dense jungle than I get in Fallout fighting 2 guys in the desert.
Personally, I'm totally sick of the Oblivion engine. The only thing that made Oblivion playable on PC was a multitude of fixes from the mod community, and there seems to be no such community for Fallout. At least Bethesda was more careful in designing the UI for high res PC monitors this time, but they've still released an unpolished and buggy product as they've done every time since Morrowind. Still, next to GTA4, it's the lesser of 2 evils so that's why it got my bucks.
Don't forget the regulator leader(Sonora Cruz) who will spaz out if there are enemies outside the Regulator HQ and run off never to be found. Oh and the enemies spawning appears to be random, the fix for this is just use the console and resurrect and bring to player(Xbox and PS3 are probably out of luck). The other glitch is if you kill unnammed Brotherhood outcasts you get a finger(indicating bad people), but kill the named outcasts and you lose karma, wtf?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
I love Fallout 3 and have never encountered a gameplay-breaking bug (with the exception of vampires in a sci-fi game...not sure how that slipped through testing). 3 crashes (quit to desktop) in more than a hundred hours of gameplay so far is more than acceptable to me.
But some people have definitely found bugs. Perhaps an unofficial patch ala Oblivion or Vampire Bloodlines will fix these.
Here's your "hyperlink".
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
This is new? Many DLP TVs support this even though not many probably care (I have one and I don't).
It took over 20 years to come out with what looks like the same technology as the Sega Master System's 3D Glasses?
I also think I saw Captain EO with the same glasses back when Michael Jackson was loved by most.
Same here, only been playing 30 hours now, but not one crash has happened. Best 30 quid I have spent in about the last 3 years. I ripped it off at first, felt so guilty after I played it for 2 hours, I went straight out and bought the damn thing! Rock solid, to quote Thurgood Stubbs, "Shut up you damn stoopid troll!"
Look up it's problems with Vista. I was unfortunate to buy it the first day it was available, before I knew about that glaring bug. I finished FO3 and clocked about 100 hours... I loved it. But it was FAR from bug free. The game crashed on me every hour on the hour like clockwork. To my knowledge it wasn't fixed, though admittedly I haven't checked since I finished it.
Aside from instability related to running it in Vista, however, I had no other problems. And who the hell cares if it was built on the Oblivion engine? Sure, it's slap-you-in-the-face obvious, but the engine looks good and I think it did the original FO's justice nonetheless. People should just accept it for what it is - not perfect, but it's still far better than most of the common drivel.
Well, On the PC version I had to use the console to get Moriarity to show up at the bar. Apparently he had walked off the map somehow because I didn't go to megaton immediately, google it. It's a real bug. Also, towards the end of the game when you're going to the Citadel the doctor (forgot the name) decides she wants to stay in the sewers and the only way to fix it is to put on noclip and walk back to get someone who
forgot to follow you.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great game, and I am still enjoying it, but don't tell me there are no bugs. And yes, Bethesda sadly does have a reputation for doing stuff like this.
The PS3 version is a buggy mess. Maybe the PC or 360 are better.
I love the game, but most of the time I quit is because my PS3 is hung.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Check out www.fallout3nexus.com. Believe me, there is a *very* healthy mod community for Fallout 3. There are people who are already starting mods that have maps completely outside of the existing FO3 map as well to extend it.
Try playing as a female. Your dad still says you look like him. SEVERAL dialogs from characters do not distinguish between genders. A lot assume you are male.
My roommate and I both experience constant crashes. I have an older AMD processor. He has a tri-core AMD processor. He has ATI gfx card, I have an nVidia. Chipsets are wildly different. He crashes me than I do. We're both using the latest patch... which is supposed to address the crashes.
The mouse "lag" is terrible. Don't tell me you don't experience it. Even my room mate does on his much superior system. Even on the lowest settings possible, I get a ton of mouse lag.
Those are just the bugs I can think of off the top of my head. I've put in several hours and I got bored really fast... There isn't the freedom of the other games, just the illusion of it. I didn't even beat it, but I came damn close... just got way too bored, especially with those bugs. I consider those bugs game breaking, so even if I didn't get bored, I'd still get tired of the constant crashes and the mouse lag.
NPCs are constantly walking off and killing themselves. There's at least one mission I cant finish because of a bug and another I had to do some weird work-around I found online to finish. There are occasional random crashes too.
Its not too bad, but releasing a patch to fix the six or seven bugged missions would have been nice, instead we're probably getting "horse armor" and "more fancy dresses" for your character.
Then get the patch and try it again.
Even if Fawkes is a she,
1. Then what's her excuse when the player character is a woman too, not to mention that the paladin is a woman too? That she's just a bitch and wants to see one of the other two women die horribly? That fits soo good with the whole Fawkes the righteous good supermutant act. Not.
2. _If_ they wanted to do it gender-based, then how about letting me use the Lady Killer perk there? I mean, wtf, there's this perk which mysteriously makes women do my bidding in game, despite of the fact that it only produces the most horrible pick-up lines in recorded history. (I mean, for example, there's this perfectly stranger grandma, and I suddenly get the option to spew something that would fit at most if we were already past "third base", and mysteriously she gives me ammo for it instead of a slap.) Why not give me an option to use it on Fawkes then?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I can understand if you were stuck with a 360, but with the amazing Valkyria Chronicles out for the PS3 you made a poor choice.
Anyone could have told you Fallout 3 was going to be a buggy and mind numbingly braindead mess just like their previous titles.
I've actually found this bug quite charming.
I just thought "Man, radiation really fried peoples brains here. Maybe living in a bomb crater isn't such a good idea after all".
Other than that, it crashed only one time (xbox version) in about 120 hours playtime total.
Ah. Thanks, I wondered where Walter went. I've been playing on the PS3 since it came out, and have been enjoying being relatively "spoiler free" by not visiting any sites.
Outside of Walter disappearing, I haven't seen any other glitches (that I'm aware of :) ).
Guess I'm glad that I already finished his quest, but its too bad, I was saving up scrap metal hoping for his return. :/
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Actually, the engine is a mishmash of purchased products, most of which have fairly good reputations (Bink, SpeedTree, Gamebryo, etc, though admittedly, some features like SpeedTree are now included as part of Gamebryo). To me it always felt assembled from those pieces because they have a certain design that they never seem to let go of. There is no reason for load times from a graphics standpoint (Gamebryo supports asynchronous scene loading), for instance, but they still load scenes one at a time and run a state engine.
Funny that you mention Eve - I've noticed that MMORPGs in general tend to be the most stable games (probably because most are written from scratch - the exception I know of is Warhammer, which is Gamebryo).
My personal opinion of Fallout 3 is mixed - like all Bethesda games I've played, there is very little attachment between the main character and anyone else, but like any major action movie, the plot doesn't matter much, it's all about the eye candy (and Bethesda does that well). Silly things like 2 gang members shooting at me with pea shooters while I'm in brotherhood armor (no power armor yet) make me laugh - if I and my friend had cheap Chinese Pistols and a guy with a assault rifle and full ballistic battle armor approached me, I'd a) run b) hide c)be peaceable - I would NOT d) CHARGE!!! (Leeroy Jenkins!!!).
It's also really too bad they didn't put any thought into alternatives in some cases - I mean, if I go to the super duper mart dressed as a gang member and they have dozens of members, how do they know I'm an enemy at long range? And really - if one or even two persons approached you without weapons drawn and you had a good 30 people at your back, would you suddenly open up on the approaching people, or would you find out what they wanted (and then kill them)? Bethesda seems to have this mentality that the only option is sneak or shoot. Fallout at least would let you approach. I would understand if I was wandering and got attacked from the hills, but not so much from some kind of civilization.
Incidentally, I watched a movie on Max called Doomsday and had the same problems with it that I did with Fallout 3 - people are stupid in the movie (they behave about as stupid as zombies in zombie movies - kill someone, then just stand there cheering while they die in a hail of gunfire... ugh... ). There are so many points in that movie where I think "what would a real person do here" and the movie does just the opposite. That said, the movie itself isn't bad if you just say "it's a campy movie" get over it. The movie Independence Day had exactly the same issue (so unscientific you can't even call it science fiction, but it was an OK action movie with nice special effects).
To be fair they weren't real vampires, just glorified cannibals.
I've had a few crashes and one time in the Enclave base I got stuck under the floor railing and wasn't able to get to the stairs. Only happened once though and wasn't repeatable.
I think most of these 'its buggy' people just nitpick over everything for the sake of nitpicking over everything. I've seen graphic glitches, animation glitches, pathing issues and lots of havoc quirks but nothing that would send me on a quest to belittle the game claiming it to be a POS engine.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
There's a list of known bugs here:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_3_Bugs
Slowdowns can sometimes be fixed by cleaning the cache or even defragging your disk. More memory helps, as well, as does lower graphics settings. Personally, I've only seen a couple of crashes, both during long sessions and because the game ran out of addressable memory (pretty much screaming "I leak like a sieve!"). If you have lots of RAM, you'll probably never see a leak related crash, however (I have 2GB).
When I first got the game it would crash once every 2 hours. I applied the patch and it crashed every 1. I attempted every fix under the sun and tech support was decidedly unhelpful. I got a refund and then pirated the game and reinstalled on a clean system.
It still crashes every 2 hours. At least I don't have to pay for support that doesn't want to do it's job.
I believe that is another source of problems. Sometimes NPCs' pathfinding goes awry and they end up sitting in the radiated water surrounding the bomb until they die of rad poisoning. Really sad.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
I have this game for PS3 and it is definitely the buggiest game I have ever played. NPCs dying. The character often gets stuck on obstacles, behind a tree and a rock in Oasis, in rocks while trying to climb to hard to reach areas and many times on stair railings. The game will lock up all the time, you don't have to be doing anything. Just walking around will cause it to completely lock up requiring you to hold down the power button (power sensor?) until the machine shuts off. The locking up gets worse and worse the more you use a plasma weapon it seems. Keeping track of goo piles seems to make the game very unstable. The save from my first play through is mostly unplayable now, usually locks up every 20 or so minutes when it's in the mood to be annoying. I've also gotten crash to desktops from it. I have never experienced those in anything but an EA PC game before.
Those are problems I would consider major. If they happened once in a while I would understand. It is a huge and complicated game after all. But these happen all the time, I can't sit down and play for a while without being annoyed by many glitches.
While Valkyria Chronicles is a good Turn Based Tactics game, it's not even close to an RPG and is set in a very fairy tale like, anime, fantasy land with a story and character interaction that is 100% on rails. While FO3 isn't the deepest or most non-linear RP experience available, it offers magnitudes more in these departments than Valkyria Chronicles does, in addition to a much more gritty, post-apocalyptic setting. From an RP perspective Valkyria Chronicles is the very definition of braindead. Every conversation is a "press X to continue" type situation. The only decision you get to make in the development of your squad is what order to buy equipment and new levels for them. As mentioned the story is 100% episodic and the only choice you have in how it plays out is to not watch the cutscenes that are marked as optional. I like both games personally, but they have very little in common with each other. My opinion of FO3 probably would have been much different if I had bought it for PS3 though. Have had almost 0 issues with it on PC.
Some days it runs just fine for me. Other days it crashes to the desktop every 10 minutes. *shrug* It usually seems to the nvidia driver crashing which takes down all of Fallout. Happened in Oblivion also.
Could be because I'm running it on Vista 64, who knows?
This is not true as the game will smartly give you less skill points to distribute. That of course assuming you're not cheating the skills themselves.
I'll name the bugs since I'm one of the main people providing fixes.
Sound-loop buzzing - can only be fixed by turning your audio acceleration down to Basic or None - SAME WITH OBLIVION.
Audio/Framerate sync stuttering - No fix, Present in Oblivion and FO3. Seems dependent upon combinations of Older sound cards and newer graphics hardware for it to be triggered.
Framerate dropping - Timing issue in the OBLIVION ENGINE which was NEVER PATCHED.
You want more? Give me two more weeks of hacking through the code with my friends. There's even a problem like Oblivion had keeping floor and ground textures loaded (desert sands look like a sand-colored block, heavily pixelated. LOD issue, just like Oblivion had.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Game was, and is, unplayable on my new rig that I practically bought for the purpose of playing games of this sort.
Given that, I don't really care how much dlc Bethsoft releases.
I'm only going to be happy with DLC if I get to play as Liberty Prime.
I speak as someone who played the PC version and, despite being a diehard original Fallout/Fallout 2 fan, managed to enjoy Fallout 3 on the basis of "well, I would have liked it if they didn't put Fallout's name on it, so it's clearly not a bad game." I still wish they hadn't used Fallout's name, though.
That said, I found the game to be incredibly buggy in many respects. The most annoying was the absurd number of times I crashed to desktop. I'm talking northward of a hundred in maybe 50-60 hours of gameplay. Also, extended periods of play made the game rather laggy on High settings, despite others on the internet with worse specs than my machine reporting that they could play on Ultra with no problem. It seemed proportional to how often I went into VATS (which itself was unnecessarily laggy).
As for some more SPOILERIFFIC bugs, the worst was certainly in Big Town where I was tasked with fixing some robots, but the robots were nowhere to be found. The fix, according to the intertubes, was to spawn the robots using the game console. While all I did was fix an issue that never should have come up, I couldn't help but feel shame throughout the rest of the game at having used the console to "cheat". There were a few instances where completing mission objectives before they became objectives meant that the waypoint stayed on my map after they became objectives. This meant that I had a waypoint pointing at the Lincoln memorial until I beat the game! A few other minor flag instances also came up, but most were fixed if I had an appropriately timed save I could go back to without being too annoying.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
My 360 version crashes every couple of hours due to bad DVD reads. It'll try to load a conversation file and hang.
This was one of my huge pet peeves with Fallout 3.
I would be ungodly good. I would have saved their town numerous times. I would be known worldwide as the salvation of mankind. But if my eyes so much as glanced near their door they would start being pissy at me. "You better not be thinking about stealing that!"
"Or What! What are you going to do puny human being? Punch me in my Power Armor? You should be practically worshipping me and offering me your daughters to do with as I please--of course you know I'm such a good person I wouldn't accept but know that I would appreciate the offer."
When recognized I should be like death itself to my enemies and Jesus Christ descended from the clouds to my friends. If I steal your apple... I must have a good reason-- even if I don't what are you going to do about it, I could kill everybody in the room. Awed admiration should be the name of the game by level 20 with perfect karma.
And there is no reason for every raider to attack me. It's just annoying. I don't need the XP. I'm a busy guy.
I also wish they had implemented an economy. When I bring in 100 Chinese Assault Rifles. The price of Chinese Assault rifle should drop amongst the civilized peoples to whom I sell my wares. Bonus points if the lower cost of an assault rifle resulted in every tom dick and hary now being able to afford an assault rifle. And with less bandits it would see the cost of goods should drop too. Less risk. More runs.
Fallout 3 crashes all the time for me. When wandering around the Wasteland (it only autosaves when you enter/leave buildings or locations) I have to constantly save, otherwise my progress will inevitably lost by a freeze/lockup. Also, many quests are bugged, and the physics are so bad it's easily to stuck in an insignificant pile of rubble.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Fallout 1/2/3 rooks forever and will never die !
JMule user, enjoy it : http://www.jmule.org
In the first fallout, the same would be true above a certain level of barter skill. And since one of the shopkeepers would replace their stock of skill training books every day, infinite money meant (sort-of) maxing out the hacking, repair, survival, first aid, and small guns skills. (IIRC, the skill books could only train you up to 90%, and you'd have to spend point above that.)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
You think?
I hope the downloadable content comes in a Disk form as well and not just available through microsoft points. I believe Bethesda did that for Oblivion so I don't see why they wont for Fallout. I can't wait for the Brotherhood of Steel exansion coming up in March though. BADASS!
I think that your DVD drive is on it's way out. I have the same issues, even on games that are scratch free. I suggest transferring the game to the 360 hard drive (you *do* have a 360 hard drive, don't you?). I was having the same exact issues as you until I did that. Never any read errors and the game loads up much faster too.