First post, but I've been reading this site off and on for years, just stuck with a hotmail account and never got around to signing up.
I'm on the NMA side of the Fallout 3 debate.
I'm playing FO3 on the PS3, though I think most of the bugs I've experiences are platform independent - in fact, I haven't experienced any of the issues some claim to plague the PS3 version.
My primary reason for doing this is the mod community. Hopefully if we condense issues in a thread someone could eventually work on resolving some, much like, say, the thread on Arcanum over at rpgcodex. Or maybe I just need to rant.
Some of these aren't technically 'bugs'. But all need fixing.
1. Hitpoint display incorrect. This only happened to me once, but my HUD suddenly started displaying me at 0 hitpoints despite knowing I had about half my hitpoints left. I healed some hitpoints with a stimpack and it knocked it back to the correct display.
2. Items randomly flying around the screen. I believe this is due to the terrible engine, probably unfixable. Shockingly bad.
3. Items that can't be picked up. I've experienced this in several places - you'll see a mentat on a shelf, maybe a corner stuck into a wall. Nothing you can do with your cursor will let you pick it up. Since these are items 'placed' by level designers, I'm pretty shocked. Actually, there's lots of strange clipping issues with placed items, like a skeleton on a dock near Arefu that's stuck halfway into the dock through the wood.
4. The AI is terrible. I don't know if this is fixable. One of the cooler random encounters I stumbled across was a brotherhood vs. mutant fight. Most of the super mutants had nail boards, 1 or 2 had hunting rifles (suprise suprise). The supermutants slaughtered all but 1 of the brotherhood while I went around running up to each Super Mutant and VATing my combat shotgun at his head. I killed them all with one Brotherhood left... who, despite me just saving his life, told me to scram, and then, 10 seconds later, went into 'flee' mode.
5. Supermutants ridiculously easy to kill. I'm level 10 and most still have nailboards or hunting rifles (that they can't aim worth a dime). Close range VAT combat shotgun to the head always is an instant kill, and I never take damage unless they got off a lucky shot with the rifle. I've been doing this since level 3 or level 4.
6. I ran into an idiotic Behemoth Super Mutant at a raider slave camp. It took almost all my ammo, but I killed him. How? I stood in an area he couldn't fit into, and watched him 'run' at me for the 5 minutes or so it took me to unload every weapon I had into his face. In 'real life', he could have easily reached in and grabbed me, or used some sort of pole to kill me. They need a way to reach into small places. Badly. Or else they are terribly broken.
7. Speaking of #6, can we get some damage skins for enemies? Please? Nothing like firing a few hundred rounds of ammo at a Behemoth, with no outward signs of damage (other than limb health bar), only to have him finally fall over.
8. Stupid, stupid quests. There is no easy fix for this. But seriously... collect soda pop? Really? And I found her quest by giving her suitor... lingerie. Which, honestly, I thought was hilarious when I found Grady's 'package', so I guess that one was ok (except for the scripted guy that runs up to you immediately after opening the safe... nice timing, bud). Quest after quest of stupidity. I do like some of the 'stories' within places that you find (the feral ghoul cult, for example), though.
9. Close range combat shotgun VAT to the head is supremely overpowered. I can kill almost everything humanoid in this way. Granted, a combat shotgun to the head SHOULD kill anything humanoid... so this is actually a flaw with the stupid enemy AI that runs at you with nailboards and baseball bats, and doesn't ever try to keep its distance even with range weapons.
10. While we're talking about that, can we mod up enemy weaponry? If I can find ammo and weapons galore everywhere I go, there is absolutely NO reason why any enemy should be running at me with a darn nailboard. I realize enemies in the previous fallouts had melee weapons, but that was usually in a group situation where they ran at you under the cover fire of their friends. It just rarely works out that way in FO3, at least so far. I've run into so many pairs of supermutants, one with nailboard, one with hunting rifle, that it's laughable. They've never come close to killing me, even at level 3 or so. I remember almost being scared of them when i discovered the police station full of them at level 4. Too bad the instakill super shotgun technique rendered them as ineffectual as sleeping molerats.
11. A possibly cool mod idea - I hate how if someone mentions a little place or something, its placement shows up exactly on your map. That said, I do like some level of guidance here - it makes sense they'd give a bit of direction as to where to go. So howabout if someone tells you about a place, you get a larger box (or circle) on your map that indicates the general area of where you might find the place. The size of the area might even depend upon your stats (intelligence? perception?).
12. Speaking of stats, I think they're pretty useless. I upped my Perception thinking I'd be a better sniper, turns out Perception is really just 'Spider Sense'... which I rarely need since I can hear most enemies just fine and feels like a cheat anyway. I'd go into deep analysis of all of them, but, they're pretty much all broken. I do like how my high perception (or other stat) occassionally opens up a new dialog option, but rarely (as in, never) does it feel like that new option actually does anything of importance. I feel like I could win the game with all stats at 1.
13. Intense training. This perk is game breakingly bad. Or, at least, it would be if stats actually mattered. But yea, since I don't like many of the other perks (i've got gunslinger and finesse simply because I'm playing a Clint Eastwood type) I've got like 7 levels of stat upgrades at this point.
14. Back to the AI. After slaughtering an entire base of Raiders (including their pet Behemoth?), I stumbled into their Bazaar, and killed off the rest of them... except one. Just as I blew the head off of a raider, I noticed the guy standing next to him was 'named'. Turns out he's a merchant. Now, having just slain dozens of raiders - complete genocide of that camp - the merchant still 'whispers' to me and otherwise indicates that he's concerned the other raiders will be bothered he's doing business with me. Is it THAT hard to put a check in to see if I've slaughtered his friends? Really?
15. Merchants and Choice & Consequence. It seems like FO3 goes out of its way to make Merchants permanent fixtures. See my previous point, see the nuking of Megaton and the sole survivor.... Merchants should have checks in place that prevent them from doing business with you.
16. Merchants also shouldn't buy empty bottles and such. Most junk should be worth absolutely nothing.
17. Many cases of 'looks like a quest but isn't". I've see variations of this in other threads. One of mine was finding a guy that wasn't walter in the Water Purification building in Megaton sitting at Walter's desk. i was able to ask 'what are you doing here'... and was suddenly concerned he was a saboteur or something. He said something along the lines of 'none of your business'. I couldn't wait to find Walter and tell him... too bad that wasn't a dialog option.
Ok, I need a break from this. I feel better. Oddly? I actually enjoy the game. I like the exploration. But the flaws are so glaring it hurts, and should have dominated the reviews. I'm ok with the fact that I like the game despite the flaws, but quite simply, even a 9/10 would be glossing over the flaws.
I'm on the NMA side of the Fallout 3 debate.
I'm playing FO3 on the PS3, though I think most of the bugs I've experiences are platform independent - in fact, I haven't experienced any of the issues some claim to plague the PS3 version.
My primary reason for doing this is the mod community. Hopefully if we condense issues in a thread someone could eventually work on resolving some, much like, say, the thread on Arcanum over at rpgcodex. Or maybe I just need to rant.
Some of these aren't technically 'bugs'. But all need fixing.
1. Hitpoint display incorrect. This only happened to me once, but my HUD suddenly started displaying me at 0 hitpoints despite knowing I had about half my hitpoints left. I healed some hitpoints with a stimpack and it knocked it back to the correct display.
2. Items randomly flying around the screen. I believe this is due to the terrible engine, probably unfixable. Shockingly bad.
3. Items that can't be picked up. I've experienced this in several places - you'll see a mentat on a shelf, maybe a corner stuck into a wall. Nothing you can do with your cursor will let you pick it up. Since these are items 'placed' by level designers, I'm pretty shocked. Actually, there's lots of strange clipping issues with placed items, like a skeleton on a dock near Arefu that's stuck halfway into the dock through the wood.
4. The AI is terrible. I don't know if this is fixable. One of the cooler random encounters I stumbled across was a brotherhood vs. mutant fight. Most of the super mutants had nail boards, 1 or 2 had hunting rifles (suprise suprise). The supermutants slaughtered all but 1 of the brotherhood while I went around running up to each Super Mutant and VATing my combat shotgun at his head. I killed them all with one Brotherhood left... who, despite me just saving his life, told me to scram, and then, 10 seconds later, went into 'flee' mode.
5. Supermutants ridiculously easy to kill. I'm level 10 and most still have nailboards or hunting rifles (that they can't aim worth a dime). Close range VAT combat shotgun to the head always is an instant kill, and I never take damage unless they got off a lucky shot with the rifle. I've been doing this since level 3 or level 4.
6. I ran into an idiotic Behemoth Super Mutant at a raider slave camp. It took almost all my ammo, but I killed him. How? I stood in an area he couldn't fit into, and watched him 'run' at me for the 5 minutes or so it took me to unload every weapon I had into his face. In 'real life', he could have easily reached in and grabbed me, or used some sort of pole to kill me. They need a way to reach into small places. Badly. Or else they are terribly broken.
7. Speaking of #6, can we get some damage skins for enemies? Please? Nothing like firing a few hundred rounds of ammo at a Behemoth, with no outward signs of damage (other than limb health bar), only to have him finally fall over.
8. Stupid, stupid quests. There is no easy fix for this. But seriously... collect soda pop? Really? And I found her quest by giving her suitor... lingerie. Which, honestly, I thought was hilarious when I found Grady's 'package', so I guess that one was ok (except for the scripted guy that runs up to you immediately after opening the safe... nice timing, bud). Quest after quest of stupidity. I do like some of the 'stories' within places that you find (the feral ghoul cult, for example), though.
9. Close range combat shotgun VAT to the head is supremely overpowered. I can kill almost everything humanoid in this way. Granted, a combat shotgun to the head SHOULD kill anything humanoid... so this is actually a flaw with the stupid enemy AI that runs at you with nailboards and baseball bats, and doesn't ever try to keep its distance even with range weapons.
10. While we're talking about that, can we mod up enemy weaponry? If I can find ammo and weapons galore everywhere I go, there is absolutely NO reason why any enemy should be running at me with a darn nailboard. I realize enemies in the previous fallouts had melee weapons, but that was usually in a group situation where they ran at you under the cover fire of their friends. It just rarely works out that way in FO3, at least so far. I've run into so many pairs of supermutants, one with nailboard, one with hunting rifle, that it's laughable. They've never come close to killing me, even at level 3 or so. I remember almost being scared of them when i discovered the police station full of them at level 4. Too bad the instakill super shotgun technique rendered them as ineffectual as sleeping molerats.
11. A possibly cool mod idea - I hate how if someone mentions a little place or something, its placement shows up exactly on your map. That said, I do like some level of guidance here - it makes sense they'd give a bit of direction as to where to go. So howabout if someone tells you about a place, you get a larger box (or circle) on your map that indicates the general area of where you might find the place. The size of the area might even depend upon your stats (intelligence? perception?).
12. Speaking of stats, I think they're pretty useless. I upped my Perception thinking I'd be a better sniper, turns out Perception is really just 'Spider Sense'... which I rarely need since I can hear most enemies just fine and feels like a cheat anyway. I'd go into deep analysis of all of them, but, they're pretty much all broken. I do like how my high perception (or other stat) occassionally opens up a new dialog option, but rarely (as in, never) does it feel like that new option actually does anything of importance. I feel like I could win the game with all stats at 1.
13. Intense training. This perk is game breakingly bad. Or, at least, it would be if stats actually mattered. But yea, since I don't like many of the other perks (i've got gunslinger and finesse simply because I'm playing a Clint Eastwood type) I've got like 7 levels of stat upgrades at this point.
14. Back to the AI. After slaughtering an entire base of Raiders (including their pet Behemoth?), I stumbled into their Bazaar, and killed off the rest of them... except one. Just as I blew the head off of a raider, I noticed the guy standing next to him was 'named'. Turns out he's a merchant. Now, having just slain dozens of raiders - complete genocide of that camp - the merchant still 'whispers' to me and otherwise indicates that he's concerned the other raiders will be bothered he's doing business with me. Is it THAT hard to put a check in to see if I've slaughtered his friends? Really?
15. Merchants and Choice & Consequence. It seems like FO3 goes out of its way to make Merchants permanent fixtures. See my previous point, see the nuking of Megaton and the sole survivor.... Merchants should have checks in place that prevent them from doing business with you.
16. Merchants also shouldn't buy empty bottles and such. Most junk should be worth absolutely nothing.
17. Many cases of 'looks like a quest but isn't". I've see variations of this in other threads. One of mine was finding a guy that wasn't walter in the Water Purification building in Megaton sitting at Walter's desk. i was able to ask 'what are you doing here'... and was suddenly concerned he was a saboteur or something. He said something along the lines of 'none of your business'. I couldn't wait to find Walter and tell him... too bad that wasn't a dialog option.
Ok, I need a break from this. I feel better. Oddly? I actually enjoy the game. I like the exploration. But the flaws are so glaring it hurts, and should have dominated the reviews. I'm ok with the fact that I like the game despite the flaws, but quite simply, even a 9/10 would be glossing over the flaws.
