Fallout 3

[ZenfoldorVGI]

Mise said:

 

Actually, that - or a part of that - is one of my biggest gripes with it.

While there is a lot of stuff to do, most of that equates to pointless busywork. You can only see a generic blasted-out office building so many times before you get sick of them, and just about always the only thing you can do in them is either a) hoarding loot you'll never either use or sell, or b) abusing the broken battle system beating either the generic human enemies, the neutered Enclave, or the orc mar- er, "super" mutant hordes. The game has its share of bright spots, like the Harold quest or the pseudo-superheroes, but beyond those few it's - well - flat out BORING. Really, it's the same issue Oblivion suffers from, only not as bad.

And I stopped using VATS a few hours into the game since it wrecked the already abusable battle system even further. And I sunk a good 40 hours into it on my only runthrough, so saying that it "gets good" n hours in is kind of pointless - if it has gotten good at that point, it's not worth my time.

The game has a crapload of other issues as well, like the atrocious plot with roughly the most disappointing ending ever, being audiovisually bland with the stilted animations being absolute immersion-killers, being way too combat heavy for my liking since the combat's bad etc.

The only thing that can save this game for me is modding it up the arse, since the base game falls short on quite many ways.

That said, I vaguely noted those issues while I was having the time of my life. It's such a huge game, that you can point out many individual flaws, but any game is greater(or worse) than the sum of its parts. In these examples I like to point to Resistance 2, which used a notorious bullet points list as a sales tactic. The game did indeed live up to all of those bullet points, it just wasn't as good as one would assume, despite that.

Again, there might be a list of negatives about any great game a mile long, but one positive can completely overcome that, if it's big enough.

Our base disagreement, it seems, is that you found the exploration of the waste to be busywork and repetitive, I found it to be vastly exciting, like I was really exploring, and there was SO MUCH stuff to find out there, hidden in those ruins, so many people and stories, and quests, and references, that it just blew my mind. On my first run, for instance SPOILER, I completely missed the forest section of the game, or the alternative radio station....I haven't had as much fun exploring a game since the original Zelda. I never, ever, got bored playing Fallout 3, so in that, our opinions diverge.