Yes, just with a very very few exceptions like your own father.




Yes, they do indeed. I just discovered that yesterday infact when I got some more skills in Intelligence. If you have more skills in charm or other ones, you get other options aswell.



If you use unarmed combat, you ocassionally will kick. So yes



Yep



No, they are actually very authentic and very real (except for some "tunnel snake" dialogs in the beginning".

Have no fear, Fallout 3 is a worthy sequel, even if i would have liked a more fallout 1/2 oriented V.A.T.S. better.

Oh! And the storyline is huge and with lots of unexpected turns.

The lack of shadows? Yes, most videos definitely do show this, but I don't see this as an outdated game. It's a choice they made, perhaps because a full stencil shadow system would be too demanding of low-end PCs?

Anyways, no offense to you, but I've actually got the game and it definitely doesn't feel outdated. (It's my taste I guess.) Take for example a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R and it feels much more outdated (even though it doesn't matter for the game experience itself I must say).

I do blame the hardware for washed out textures and things like that, if you compare the Xbox360 version and PC version with the PS3 version you'll see hardware matters,

Cheers

yes, stalker looks much more aged.

and yes, actually objects throw dynamic shadows even on my low shadow settings (4),

Broozar, look here (there are many screen shots of F3):
http://www.fallout-hq.de/screenshot_bilder_pic_galerie.php

some characters cast shadows but most of them do not.

Look at this room. It looks fake, the chair and the table don't cast shadows, no ambient occlusion. It looks like they hover over the ground, faked, like a photo montage:



But the geometry has nice dynamic lighting applied. So the meshes do not look that bad because of the per-pixel lighting shaders. This is a bit bothering. At the one hand it uses modern lighting and features per mesh. But the world has weak or no lighting. It is not consistent.

Michael, your post really gave me hope because after some stuff I've read over the internet the past couple of years had me writing this game off before it actually got into development... So I tried to download the demo, only to find out there will be NO demo released and I thought.. that's a bit fishy... So I googled some more and that's what I found out..




So, no then.

I also found out you can't kill kids. In fallout 1/2 you could disembowel small innocent girls with a plasma minigun until there was nothing left, arms and legs flying everywhere..
You could also kill every main NPC like your Overseer, resulting in an alternate game ending (obviously..)




My research ended in disappointment here as well. Intelligence 1 doesn't make you talk like a retard in the entire game and completely change the course of the game since 90% of the quests you'd be locked out from since no-one could understand you.. (the bug men come for the moo moo's!) It just changes a couple of options here and there. lame




But can you specifically call an attack on the "groin"? Fallout 1 taught us that big green scary mutants fall down as easily as humans with a carefully placed kick on their charlies. :P




Seriously? :P Well that's one point for fallout 3 :P In which scene exactly do you get the honors..?




That's two points for Fallout 3... They definatelly seem to be better than oblivion.. It seems as they tried too hard on the profanity though. Just because every single NPC sounds like a crackhead from the Bronx doesn't make it Fallout worthy.


Anyhow, I know I'm nitpicking but I'm a huge Fallout fan and after I looked around today, I know this will be as bad as when Larry 8 got released without Al Lowe in it (Larry's creator). People would see my nickname and say "Oh yeah, larry I loved that game with it's funny mini-games and stripping chicks..." The bastards ruined me nickname


Anyway, I won't be buying this. I'll save my money for Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 which are being developed by their original devs..

The problem with "thenadays" and "nowadays" is, that if they would have made children killing possible, they would have never been allowed to release the game. And even if, they would have been sued in a matter of hours by hundreds of mothers who come crying that their little sonny is killing small girls in "that video game".

However, you can kill the overseer. No problem, I did that my first time around and suffered some consequences. Even a tad later in the game when I tried to return to Vault 101.




Oh well, a point for you, maybe they dont change the game as much as in the previous games, but they still do. But see it that way. There are THOUSANDS of dialog options in the game. Much much more than in Fallout 1/2, and every single one of them voiced. Just the sheer amount you would have to change just for every possible ability combination would be nuts. Not considering that you would need 2 DVDs to install the game. Even now, all the voice acting is around 2 GB, just the voices!



Well, not exactly. I took the rape and kicking thing in a not so literal sense.

The problem once again is in the legality nowadays. You just CANT release such a game.
I mean, look at GTA3, they had so many problems just because someone enabled a hidden mode that enabled you to have SEX with prostitutes! Can you imagine what scandals and legal problems Bethesda would get if you get raped by the mutants, kill children or specifically target the nuts of someone?

I am sure they would have if they could have, but I am sure, someone will come up with a Mod some day to enable all this. It's just, bethesda cant. And you also you wouldnt want the company who made the game you are enjoying at a given time to get in troubles.


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Anyway... Im disappointed after I finally finished the game. IT ISNT OPEN ENDED! And I havent finished all the side quests because I thought I can finish them later. Thats soooooo disappointing!

never forget, it's critique on a very high level. i'd be happy if i could create such rooms. i wouldn't call it "fake" or "weak". i think the developers had to face a serious problem: either they used static shadows which wouldn't go well with the dynamic lighting, the day/night cycle and the physics, or they tried dynamic shadows on all objects which would have made the game playable on year 2012 machines. so they gave us a slider that allowed us to choose the shadow quality, i'd be interested in test results, my machine is just too weak to test it all on the highest settings.

Yep, thats what I heard from other players. They also said that they didnt like how quick the main quest could be solved.

Im not sure if Ill be getting this game.

Well, you CAN finish the main quest fast, if you skip several parts. If you play it with all the side quests and even take on to explore some time and not just travel to key locations, you get well over 100 hours of gameplay.

Infact, you can pretty much finish it in a speedrun way. But thats not the way you are supposed to do it.

I did lots of sidequests and then took on a step from the main storyline every now and then. It's just that I didnt finish them all because I thought I can finish them later. Thats what is disappointing me. And I dont even have any savegame before I started that last part!

I still haven't finished the game, but I don't see how it matters whether the game is open ended or not. If you want to learn about all the different endings, you'll have to replay the game anyways.

I'm very much looking forward to playing through the whole game a couple of times.



So true. It's exactly why it doesn't make sense to call the engine outdated just because you don't like the choice they made.

Cheers