User:Vaultbuilder

Name: Vaultbuilder

=My Soapbox= Okay, so Fallout 3 is here. Yes, I - like so many of you - waited eagerly for so long, endured the depression brought on by the cancellation of Van Buren, and wondered what Bethesda would make of it.

Now, let me say here and now that I like Bethesda Softworks. Morrowind is still one of my favorite games, and I was confident that they'd do a good job. I'm pleased to say that, for the most part, they didn't let me down. I've played it through twice and am looking forward to tinkering with GECK. But, for those of you bored enough to be trolling user pages, my detailed breakdown of my yays and nays of Fallout 3. I'll add to them as I think of more. And please don't get into screaming at me over these things. They're just my own observations, just like you're entitled to yours.

Fallout 3 Yays

 * Many of our favorite weapons came back for the third installment, and some of them were better-handled than before.


 * The game wasn't clogged with far-too-many pop-culture references. Yes, I liked them, too, but FO2 kept destroying the suspension of disbelief every nine seconds with another annoying pop cliche. Bethesda did it the way the original Fallout did it: faired into the game world with finesse, never breaking the thematic elements of the world, and as something to enhance the experience of people who get it, while leaving the people who don't get it none the worse. Do I think everybody got the point behind the Dunwich building? No, because not everybody read H.P. Lovecraft. Do I think it set a nice tone? Absolutely. The professor from the Simpsons is Doc Lesko? Cool. Yet not overdone.


 * Finally got to wander around a Vault that felt like a living space. Got to sit in those weird-looking chairs that actually turned out to be more functional than I'd thought.


 * Also finally got a look-see into the beating heart of the Vault system and its dark recesses. The Vault-Tec headquarters building alone was worth the trip, and the deal with Dr. Braun was inspired.


 * Super Mutants were everything I thought they could be: big, ugly, strong as nails and dumb as bricks.


 * Bethesda sure did a great job creating a visually stimulating wasteland. It never really got boring. Sure, getting waylaid by the same frickin' stealth radscorpion got annoying, but that's the hazards of living in the wastes, right?


 * They also nicely sidestepped the potential pitfall of recycling villains by letting the Enclave's bad guy be some officer with a burr under his saddle as opposed to a shortsighted leader. In fact, the leadership direction taken by Bethesda for the Enclave was outstanding, and not just in casting.


 * Very good job maintaining the 50's motif while not making a mess of it. All of the architecture, vehicle and equipment designs, fonts, even the style of writing all reflected that wonderful, fractured-timeline world that Fallout inhabited. Loved it. Even the delightfully retro music selections on GNR was perfectly placed because, let's face it, that was the classic music of the day, which is to say the stuff that aired on pre-rock stations.


 * Cute idea to let GNR make commentaries on the player's choices. That only got old when he kept repeating himself or failed to recognize changes in the game world, but that was mercifully minimal. But why, oh why, did you take that toy away when we hit level 20?


 * A combination yay/nay: YAY - You released the editing tools! Now we common Fallout junkies can manipulate the Fallout universe like we've always wanted to! We can bring back the abandoned EPA! We can make our own Vaults, for goodness sake! And you called it GECK! How perfect was that?! NAY - Good heavens GECK is a resource hog! And which sadistic [bleep] came up with the navmesh system? Was that really necessary? What was wrong with the good ol' collision-detection method, huh?


 * Finally, a Pip-Boy I can see as a functional tool! Yeah, yeah, so it doesn't fit in with the whole 1950s vacuum-tube technology motif. If it did, it'd be a backpack Pip-Man, not a wrist-top Pip-Boy.


 * MAJOR YAY: NO ONLINE AUTHENTICATION. I still haven't bought Spore because of its psychotic DRM garbage, and though it would have broken my heart, I would've kicked Fallout overboard if it had gone the same way.


 * Good job adding consequences for being a good guy. It used to be that evil people had bounty hunters to fear, and good guys were just fine. Adding those Talon Company goons was a nice touch, and a fine source of extra revenue.


 * Harold was back again. Harold's practically our little buddy out in the Fallout wasteland, and it wouldn't've been Fallout without him. And we're sure he'll still be around somehow in the future. I think I know how, too...


 * The Fat Man. Slim Pickens dreamed about that thing. Heck, we all did. I just wish the thing would've flown more than 40 feet.


 * Bethesda, I was in absolute awe with your VATS idea. Honestly, I had no idea how you planned to reconcile a turn-based shooter with exquisite targeting capabilities with a real-time run-and-gun...and yet you did it. And, with the cinematic elements, did it very well. But, uh, why did you take away our groin shots? Come on, those were fun!


 * I know this isn't a popular position, but it's a yay to me: you finally threw out traits. Good; I never used them anyway and I thought they were a waste. Now, you had to call the level items "perks," and I would've been mad if it'd been done any other way, but ah...is cannibalism really a perk?


 * Someone finally decided that the Brotherhood of Steel isn't homogeneous. There are differences of opinion that can cause schisms! Creating a splinter faction of the Brotherhood was a good move; making the source of the schism the question of whether it is nobler to stay the mission or help the locals was even better. And even though they were truly jerks, could you really completely fault the Outcasts for feeling the way they did?


 * Although it would not have been practical in the previous incarnations of Fallout, the level-design crew deserves a big yay for making a wasteland full of tiny nooks and crannies. I'm still finding new things scattered around, things that are so small they don't get a dot on the map - or any other markings.


 * A specific yay shout to the level designer who elevated time wasting to an art form. I'm talking about whomever was responsible for that tiny little shelter on the city outskirts with the impressive physics demonstration. I don't know how long it took to balance a bunch of junk on ten pencils and have the physics engine behave correctly, but I was impressed.


 * Maybe it was just a cheap art trick or bit of sensationalism, but thanks to the new art and animation, ghouls finally became a visceral versus ethical reaction issue. In the previous Fallouts, yes, ghouls were kinda unpleasant to look at. But now they're downright hard on the stomach. So how tolerant are you in the end? When you're confronted by something that is viscerally repugnant to you, are you still going to leave your iron in the holster? Probably unintentional, but good work anyway.


 * A yay from the heart: you put in a Firefly reference! I'm sure every browncoat out there broke out in a big grin when Three Dog belted out those immortal words: you can't stop the signal.


 * Pretty nifty expansion content. While I'm still not really on board with this downloading content thing, you're putting the stuff out on CD, and that's perfect by my book. And I have to say, so far, so very, very good. (Although an alien mothership? What, Baltimore was booked? Is nobody interested in seeing what happened to Norfolk or Baltimore or Philadelphia or New York? Or...oooh, are you saving those for Fallout 4?)

Fallout 3 Nays

 * Too bloody short by half. Side quests were too few and far between, and much too short. The impact you could have on the game world was severely curtailed compared to the rest of the series.
 * Status Update: Getting Better! Okay, Bethesda is working on making up for this with the DLCs, but really, the "plain vanilla" game should have had more side-quests. Look at the stellar job they did with Oblivion and you'll see precisely what I mean. Fallout 1 and 2 had more in common with Oblivion in terms of side-quests and diversions than F3 had in common with any of them. It just felt...linear. Big explorable world with amazingly little going on.


 * Bad ending. I don't know who came up with the "the story ends now" idea, but it was a stupid move. The rest of the franchise left the player's future open, allowing for new installments. Bethesda pulled a pretty dumb maneuver by boxing themselves in. Whatever happens in the future is going to have to be a pretty strange retcon, unless Bethesda intentionally torpedoed the franchise, which seems unlikely.
 * Status Update: Fixed! We didn't retcon, we just re-wrote...which is cool. I have no problem with it! It's one thing to make the mistake of, oh, killing the main character and ending the story like an ax chop. But it's the smart and, really, brave thing to admit "yup, that was kinda nearsighted and dumb, so we're going to erase that and make it better." Great job.


 * In the same vein, bad ending sequence. I always looked forward to the Wasteland Roll-Call, as Ron Pearlman told me of the good and bad things that happened to the places I visited. A few grainy snapshots without voiceover does not an epilogue make.


 * What on Earth possessed the art department to go with Soviet-pattern automatic shotguns? Those things looked like something a kid built out of an Erector Set: sad.


 * Feral ghouls? Guys, just be honest: you know how to do zombies thanks to the Elder Scrolls series and you didn't want the animations and sound effects to go to waste.


 * Let me be blunt: Bethesda was too cheap when it came to voice actors. They tried to use a half-dozen voice actors to provide material for 100+ NPCs, and it didn't work. There were, what, three female voice actors? Maybe five males? There were more people than that working in the bloody office. Put an ad in the paper: "Your voice in a video game!" It worked for Valve when they needed more face models for NPCs. The fact that the same voice actors and actresses did so many different NPCs was just plain pathetic.


 * Too many crash bugs. "Bethesda" is just about synonymous with "quality," so I have no idea how that happened, but it did.
 * Status Update: New for Old Patches have squashed some bugs but created others. This is the story of PC gaming, and it's part of the price you pay when you trade the (relative) stability of a console for the truly powerful, kick-you-in-the-head performance you get on a PC...not to mention the ability to edit the game. Bugs will be bugs forever. But it does seem like QC is still not quite up to the lofty levels that the Bethesda name commands.


 * Many others have said it, and I will, too: Bethesda wimped out on the regionalization issue. Just because the Germans and French have a hangup about calling them drugs and putting kids in potential danger, you messed up the game worldwide. I agree completely: redoing the content for those regions specifically would have been a pain. But gumming up the experience for everybody was a mistake, especially when you knew all along that those brats in Little Lamplight were going to be so hate-worthy. You missed out on your chance for a big ethical conundrum - shoot the evil kid or don't shoot because it's a kid - because you didn't want to handle the resulting PR flak.
 * Status Update: Psycho Toddlers Still Run Amok But, really, we couldn't expect anything else. At least there's a fleet of freelance modders willing to open the doors. And, really, I'm still kind of annoyed that this had to be an issue in the first place. But I'm taking the Blanket of Blame off Bethesda. With the fragile state of gaming thanks to overzealous legislators, I can't blame Bethesda for being careful about putting kids in the line of fire in a game where heads routinely explode.


 * Sorry, but the soundtrack was bad. As in "I had to turn it off." There was only one good piece of music, and that was the brief piece when the player first enters the wasteland. Other than that, total loss, and one which I really can't explain. Up to this point, Bethesda had turned out one amazing soundtrack after another. What went wrong here??
 * Status Update: Kinda Seeing It, Still Hating It Okay, I get it now. The music director was going for a sort of Mad Max-inspired soundtrack. I'm with you now. But the music is still nowhere near the cinematic...hell, symphonic quality of all the other Bethesda soundtracks.


 * Level cap at 20? It said one thing: we don't intend for you to play this game forever like you did with Morrowind.
 * Status Update: Gone! Level caps are up, and new perks to boot! Said it before, and will say it again: Bethesda is one of the absolute top game producers in the industry. Why? They listen to the gamers!


 * Like many multi-platform games, the PC version suffers from control congestion. You know the symptoms: you hit "jump," the character jumps...a few seconds later. Irksome.
 * Status Update: Still Waiting for Takeoff Still a problem, and not just on my rig. But you learn to adapt.


 * I don't know why Bethesda did away with those wonderfully tongue-in-cheek item descriptions, but they did. That was a serious mistake. We shouldn't need a third-party mod to bring them back.


 * Plot holes. 'Nuff said. Yes, the Fallout universe is rife with the things, but they never before threw a monkey wrench in the ending sequence. Someone please convincingly explain why the radiation-proof Fawkes couldn't go whack a few buttons and turn on the purifier? He'd be fine. He'd probably like the tan! But no, it was either Sarah or me, and if Sarah went there'd be a guilt trip like nobody ever knew. There were also tiny plot holes - more like inconsistencies - but they were annoying, too. I'm faced with a cabinet I can't loot unless I pick a level-80 lock...but the glass doors are shattered. Doesn't the lock seem a little pointless?
 * Status Update: Fixed!...ish We've rebuilt the ending and helped close some of those nasty plot holes. The wasteland inconsistencies still exist, but only really critical people could take those seriously.


 * What happened to commerce?? It's not that Bethesda hates capitalism; in Morrowind, traders set up in places only big enough to host a signpost. In Fallout 2, I had a half-dozen places, each with three or four separate merchants, to trade all the garbage I accumulated in the world. Now I'm down to Megaton, Rivet City, Canterbury (which almost doesn't count) and a few roving traders who are harder to find than clean bodies of water? Oh, and Tenpenny Tower and Underworld, neither of which stock anything particularly useful, nor are easy to travel around.


 * Just a minor issue, but...where did my gauss rifle go? I miss it.
 * Status Update: It's Baaaaack! And now back to your regularly-scheduled physics demonstrations.


 * The passage of time was, well, badly handled. A nuclear war supposedly happened more than 200 years before F3, yet buildings and infrastructure are in remarkably good shape. Even if it had all just been abandoned, the place would have been nearly completely disintegrated. Subway tunnels won't last 80 years, let alone 200. Working robots after 200 years without periodic maintenance? All mistakes...but forgiveable ones.


 * Who was responsible for the book embargo? One of the best things in the Elder Scrolls series of games was the plethora of books. They set the mood, fleshed out minor details and subplots, and added TONS of flavor to the game. Yet, in Fallout 3, books and all media were nigh on to nonexistant. Don't talk to me about the few holodisks of information; they don't count. Where were all the books? Do you seriously mean to tell me that in two HUNDRED years, MOIRA BROWN of all people was the only person moved to write a book? No, I think the lack of books came from two sources. The first, and simplest, was outright laziness: nobody wanted to invest the time in writing them - and I can understand that. Churning out all those books for the ES games must have been tiresome. The second issue is a little deeper, and one with which I can empathize: I think Bethesda was hesitant to dive too deeply into books because it would've meant running the risk of redefining or running counter to established history, potentially annoying the detail fiends that we Fallout fans can be. But not even trying? Come on; that's not the Bethesda way.


 * A sniper rifle that can only reach two doors away? Not much of a pistol, let alone a rifle. Yes, I know: you were afraid of unbalancing the game. Well, you did anyway. If I go through the time, trouble, and expense of keeping a sniper rifle maintained and fed, I want to be able to reach out and touch a raider practically in the next area code. At a minimum, I want to be able to hit what I can see plain as day in the scope.
 * Status Update: Fixed it myself. GECK to the rescue! See a weapon you think doesn't work right? Don't just complain! Go in there and start tweaking! And, amazingly, it didn't unbalance the game; now I need to be a LOT more careful when there might be sniper nests around, because I might not even hear the little weasel fire.


 * So did WWIII affect the Earth's rotation? Because days are nearly absurdly short. And where did that stellar Morrowind weather system go? What, there's no weather in the wasteland? Not even a sandstorm or something? What about that guy in Mad Max talking about hard [radioactive] rain? Total miss on potentially great environmental thematics.
 * Status Update: Fixed this myself, too. Into Geck we go, and a couple twiddles with the global variables and we're playing in real-time.


 * Laser rifles reduce people to a pile of ash? 'Nuff said.
 * Status Update: Could be fixed, but I don't do lasers. This could be fixed with GECK. It really could, and pretty easily. But, well, I don't like laser weapons to begin with, so it's just not worth the hassle.


 * Weapon durability modeling stunk. Sorry, but it's true. If weapons degraded as quickly in the real world as they do in F3, we'd be fighting with rocks...and they'd turn to gravel in a whack or two, anyway.


 * Someone in the art department really messed up reflection maps. Red eye in a photo is bad enough, but the GLOWING red eyes that everybody had from miscalculated light reflection on the eyeballs was creepy.


 * Pre-war ghouls with no stories to tell? Sorry, but I'm not buying it. Yeah, I can understand how becoming a ghoul might not leave you feeling to chatty, but nothing to say about the world before it all caught fire and fell down? Just a half a morsel from the lady in Underworld? Not enough. If you're going to take the approach that the majority of ghouls were alive before the war and saw it all happen, then you have to deal with the - sorry - fallout: a need for dialogue about it.


 * The subway system from another dimension drove me nuts. I'm not talking about the incomprehensible tunnel layout. I'd expect a warren of subway tunnels to be confusing. I'm talking about the hammerspace train stations. I have never - not once - found a subway station like the ones in F3. Unless there's some very strange space-time issues in DC that we're currently unaware of, entering a station through one door, walking across a platform, and exiting through the other side of the station shouldn't take you halfway across the city. More than once I was trying to go a long distance by following underground tunnels only to find that if I'd exited the station through the doors on the other side, I'd've been in Arlington. Weird and very frustrating.


 * Much as I loved the fully-interactive Vaults Bethesda came up with, whomever was responsible for creating the "works" of the world totally messed up the engineering of the Vault door. Guys, come on! It was correct back in the F1 and F2 days! You broke something that was right! Look, follow me here. Vault doors are designed to be safe from nuclear blast, okay? Now, nuclear blasts create an overpressure wave that just blows stuff out of the way - buildings, inconvenient land formations, whatever. Now, think about it: if you're trying to keep a door from being blown open, which way should it open? I'll give you a hint! "In" is wrong! Fallout fans, think with me here. In the old days, the Vault door pushed OUT into its track, then rolled into its little barn. The "new" Vault door is pulled inwards before rolling away. Now, folks, I don't care how many tons that door weighs. A near hit by even a tactical nuke will pop that door through that hole like a champagne cork. Oops.


 * The partnership with Microsoft's Games For Windows LIVE was a match made far, far away from heaven. I can only hope that Bethesda really got something delicious out of it, because, as far as I'm concerned, they really made a serious misstep. If I want expansion packs, I want to be able to walk over to the store, buy them, install them, and play them ANY TIME I WANT. This logged-in-to-Games-For-Windows-LIVE thing is ridiculous. And don't think anything is being slipped by we gamers in how you're doing this, either. $10 per DLC will take us right up to the game's release-date retail price in no time...and for very little content. Very, very weak, fellows, especially since you did the right, stand-up thing in not requiring online verification (which, really, only punishes we honest gamers).
 * Status Update: Ready to Forgive I have to be fair and truthful: I'm still pretty frosted about this. BUT, Bethesda is doing the right thing of both A) Putting the DLCs on CD, and B) Doing a GOTY edition with the DLCs included. In light of that, I'd say we can safely close the book on the GFWL complaint.
 * Status Update #2: Forget Forgiveness, I'm Furious Now Okay, now I'm mad. I look forward to my Christmas copy of GOTY and what happens? Why, I'll tell you what happened! Some utter bonehead didn't check for DLL compatibility before mastering the disc . That's right! Those of use who don't use that IRRITATING MICROSOFT INTRUSION get punished. The software will not run. Oh, there's a fix, of course...install the newest edition of Games for Windows LIVE. Yep! Install the newest version of something I never wanted anyway. And guess what?  I still don't . Bethesda (or Bethsoft or whatever you're calling yourself now), this is a failure on almost every level except game design. Your marketing people failed by creating this unholy alliance. Your QC people REALLY dropped the ball by not catching this bug TO BEGIN WITH. To borrow an internet meme: EPIC FAIL, BETHESDA.


 * Someone has to say it...an alien mothership? Guys...cute idea, but you're above this, don't you think?

GECK
And now, a moment of discussion on the subject of GECK.

I -- like many, many other Fallout fans -- was truly thrilled to see an official editor released for a Fallout game that would be able to add content quickly and easily. Truly, Bethesda deserves a big pat on the back for that one, and I do believe that we Fallout folks should be grateful. I know I am.

However, and I say this as someone who has been in this position both professionally and in a recreational setting, the documentation team could've done a better job. I know, I know; there's an entire Wiki devoted to the operation of GECK, a Wiki written by the Bethsoft wizards themselves. Well...it doesn't do a very good job. Yes, there's a lot of information, but it's so haphazardly presented that getting anything meaningful is a chore and a half. Frankly, I've had better luck just pounding on the thing until it does what I wanted it to do than I have had luck with the Wiki. It really does pain me to say that; I'm not one of those people who gets a kick out of complaining. And when you look at the wonderful work Bethesda has done in the past, you know they're capable of a lot more...and maybe that's what makes this sting.

Case in point: I wanted to add a dialogue topic. Back in the old days of TESCS, this was easy; you'd open the NPC you want to edit and with a couple right-clicks, all was right with the world. A new topic was created and you were on your way. With GECK, though, apparently you must do all your dialogue edits through the Quest system rather than the dialogue system.

Now, call me a basket case if you must, but doesn't it seem as though the logical place for dialogue editing to occur would be within, oh, perhaps the dialog system? Who would look into the quest editing tools by reflex to edit dialogue? Editing weapons and, indeed, everything else was a simple operation. I've already created custom weapons of my own without having to refer to the documentation once simply because it was an intuitive process. Go to weapons menu, right-click, add new weapon, get to work. Or start by cloning an existing weapon. Easy as falling down. But the dialog system taking a detour round China to get from point A to point B is not intuitive in the slightest.

I'm not saying that there isn't a logical reason for this. I'm sure there is, deep in the mechanics of the game. And, had the documentation been clearer on the subject, I probably would not have wasted a week trying to figure it out.

The GECK wiki needs, in my estimation, two things:
 * First, a bloody dictionary. It does us no good to have flags that can be used to create all manner of special effects but no way to know what they do. (Case in point, one of the most basic functions - Persistent Reference - has no definition in the wiki. Five ways to set and use them, but nothing that just comes out and says what the little checkbox means.)
 * Second, simple, short, step-by-step instructions for basic operations (like adding a dialogue topic). Sometimes an editor doesn't need to know all of the possible bifurcations of the process; he or she just wants to know how to add the bloody topic and get on with the day.

Admittedly, these are minor gripes and, really, only an issue because I choose to try to modify my game. I could play the game as built and never run into these issues, but I like being able to add new things to my games. I remember doing mods on the original Civilization, for heaven's sake, back in the DOS Ages, and that was NOT an easy task. My favorite games have always been those that have been open to editing. My all-time favorites, by and large, are those that were designed to be modified (Alpha Centauri fans out there are probably all nodding in unison).

Truthfully, and I say this with utmost respect and gratitude, when all is said and done about GECK, Bethesda really does deserve a major Thank You from the Fallout community for releasing the editor. While many PC gamers view the release of the builder tools more as a due than a perk, we have to remember that the production house isn't obligated to let us edit its game. They're not obligated to make the game files modular and easy to edit. They do this as a service, as a gift to us, the people who appreciate their hard work and are happy to see us try to add our own talents. And I, for one, am very grateful for GECK's release; it has let us become as much a part of the Fallout story as the creators, at least in our own ways.

=Remember Fallout 2?=

I do, and here are my old stats: Tag Skills: Small Guns, Steal, Lockpick

Favorite Weapons: .223 pistol, Combat Shotgun, Gauss Rifle

Residence: New Reno, Shark Club (Previous owners deceased)

Karma Title: Defender of the Wastes

Sandbox/testbed page: User_Sandbox:Vaultbuilder