Fallout 3

[raketenjagdpanzer]

If you haven't played it, do give it a try. I find the "Atomic Age into the early 21st century" vibe more than a little distracting, but, whatever.

The real highlights, for me, are the "ghost" radio broadcasts and a single operational data terminal you can find with some typed reports, near the ruin of a police station in a DC suburb that date back to the days right after the war.

For me it's probably as close as we'll ever get to a Twilight 2000 video game outside of the old Paragon Software RPG from the early 1990s. I wish some of the goofier elements (again, the atomic age and 1950s vibe lasting over a hundred years, or the various 50's B-Movie robots) weren't present but whatever. It's a fine game nonetheless.

[simonmark6]

If you want a more TK2 vibe you can look up Fallout Tactics. It's a small group tactic game where you lead a unit you create and equip around the Wasteland shooting and looting. I loved it but I'm a major fallout Fanboy. Wasteland 2 looks similar.

[Raellus]

Fallout 3 is one of my all-time, top-10 (top-5, probably) video games of any genre or on any platform. I don't see too much T2K in it, though, aside from atomic ruins and lots of small unit tactics combat. Fallout New Vegas has a faction (the New California Republic) which calls to mind post-TDM military organization and equipment. Aside from that, Fallout seems more Mad Max than T2K to me. Bottom line, though, is that it's a super fun game.

[Draq]

Wastleland 2 is really good. Its basicly fallout and t2k mixed together

[Draq]

I'm am a huge fallout fan. Own them all. Now excellent games to supplement t2k are metro 2033/2034, the s.t.a.l.k.e.r series, and various aspects of metal gear phantom pain. Metro is set in Russia, stalker in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine, and metal gear in both Afghanistan and Africa during the soviet invasion and mercenary wars, respectively. Now stalker and metro have mutants and environmental anomalies, but capture the gritty post apocalypse aesthetic. While metal gear is set in the late 80's and has an excellent period military setting. My favorite parts is researching and making/modding my guns.

[Targan]

I've played the hell out of all the Fallout 1st-person games. I bought Wasteland 2 but the moment I realised there was no stealth mechanic I shut it down and never played it again.

[simonmark6]

Interesting, I'm considering buying Wasteland 2 for my holiday game. I'll look into that deficiency more before finalising my purchase. Thanks.

[Draq]

That is my one complaint, I have to say.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Originally Posted by Raellus

I don't see too much T2K in it, though, aside from atomic ruins and lots of small unit tactics combat.

I do but, you know, differences of opinion and all that. Regardless it's a fine game. Between it and its add-on packs I should be quite busy before I start new Vegas (and its expansions) and then move on to FO4 (and its expansions).

After that I may go back and play FO1, 2, and tactics. I played Wasteland on my C64 about a million years ago it seems, I might try it again, then Wasteland 2.

There was a sequel to Wasteland but it was done by a completely different team and is thematically inconsistent with everything else - Fountain of Dreams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_of_Dreams

[.45cultist]

Tale of Two Wastelands lets one play Fallout 3 using Fallout New Vegas' more modern programming and gear. With a mod that lets Honest Hearts' weapons in the Mojave, I'm stalking the Capitol Wasteland with game canon Colt .45 autos and .308 hunting rifles, the AR-15 style Service Rifles, Browning 9MMs.

[swaghauler]

My godson Kevin has Fallout 4 and says it's great. IDK about that game, but if the DEVs put as much into it as SkyRim, it must be pretty good.

[Draq]

Fallout 4 is great. But honestly fallout new Vegas could've been the best. My main complaint is the map, and how incomplete it felt at times. I've put a grand total of over 700hrs since I first got it years ago. 4 is proving exceed my expectations.

[LBraden]

I have to agree with you a bit on the Fallout New Vegas map, though it is suppose to be the Nevada desert, so there wouldn't be many actual communities, though with the map compression it did feel odd.

But I still say FNV was one of the better of the newer Fallouts, 4 had potential but it just feels lacking, probably because of how compressed the cities are, and the amount of disused buildings there were in the cities, and the fact of that it felt more like it is "build a Commonwealth" rather than there be active life in the area.

Oh and the Raiders, always the raiders, if it's not a faction (who are genocidal maniacs) then they just want to kill you ...

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I like sandbox games that have a little direction to them, something like Minecraft just didn't grab me but Empyrion - Galactic Survival did even though the later game is just a more sophisticated version of Minecraft, (while Empyrion has creatures that will attack you much the same as Minecraft does, it also has the need for finding/making food otherwise your character starves to death so there's a constant pressure pushing you on).
Story-driven games that take place in a sandbox world (or even partial sandbox) are the kind of games I like best.

I've kinda been holding off on this thread because I wasn't that fussed on F:NV (stopped playing it before I even finished it) and while I have F4, I haven't installed it yet because absolutely nothing about the game convinces me that it's worth playing any time yet - I'll wait 'till there's more mods made for it. I really disliked all the damned "invisible walls" in F:NV but I wouldn't say it's a bad game, it just didn't have the sandbox elements I would have liked in a Fallout game.
Fallout 4 is... well, uninspired, at best. I've done a lot of checking to try and find the reason why I'm not fired up to play it and talked to friends who do play it. The worst aspect of F4 to me is that it seems the story is secondary to the base building and while a lot of fanboys crapped on about how fantastic the inclusion of base building was, it was just a copy of someone's mod for F3 and I'd already played it in F3, (pretty much the same thing happened with Hearthfire for Skyrim, it was a copy of someone's mod but at least it was improved a little, the base building in F4 seems like they just copied the basics of the F3 mod, shoved it in, called it "major content" and hoped the fans would not notice the lack of story.) And I really hate F4's dialogue system and voiced protagonist - they'll be the first things modded out whenever I do decide to play it.

I'm still playing a heavily modded version of F3 and also a heavily modded version of Skyrim. I'm also still playing STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl 10 years since it was released - albeit in modded form as well (the OGSE 2 mod and a second game with the Lost Alpha mod) - as well as STALKER: Call Of Pripyat with the SGM 2.2 mod.

Sad to say, nobody seems to be interested in making a post-apoc type game for the computer that doesn't have mutants, alien space bats or zombies 'cos I'd really love to have something that was closer to the T2k scenario. One of the few that is somewhere close is the MMO The Division. It's limited in scope as it takes place exclusively in Manhattan, NYC and is pretty much Diablo style play but set in the modern world and isn't as sandbox as I'd like but it's still a lot of fun.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

What gets me about the Creation engine based games that Bethsoft makes is that maps can be ANY size, practically. Before it was shut down there was a fan project to make the entirety of Middle Earth that Tolkien had mapped out using the Creation engine (the engine that Skyrim and Fallout4 use). That's an area of thousands if not tens of thousands of square miles!

Now, granted, there's something to be said for brevity but it really takes me out of my sense of immersion when someone says "Go all the way to Whiterun" and it's a five minute in-game walk, and this major hub of traffic and trade has seventeen NPCs in it.

Also, if you're looking for more to do in FO3 and FONV there's a mod called Fallout 3 Interiors and Fallout New Vegas Interiors that takes the inaccessible buildings (well, many of them) and makes them able to be explored, with loot and various unique items in them. For example, there's a now-accessible ruined department store in downtown DC that has a toy department where you can scavenge action figures of the various combat robots you encounter out in the wastes!

Little touches like that are great.

Here's some trivia about the Creation engine. It actually dates back all the way to 1999 with Morrowind. Bethsoft licensed a new engine called Gamebryo, and used it to create Morrowind and the various expansions for that game. When they created Oblivion, the next Elder Scrolls game, they switched to a newer edition of the Gamebryo engine called The Creation Engine. It was modified by increasing texture details and adding in a more detailed physics engine. All the various add-ons for Oblivion used that. Then Fallout 3 came in 2008, and New Vegas in 2010 and they too used Creation as their codebase. Skyrim and its add-ons came in 2011 onward, and of course now we have Fallout 4 and its add-ons, all still using The Creation Engine which is 12 years old. Ancient in terms of computer software!

Having played Far Cry 3 and 4 which use the Dunia engine I can honestly say that while I prefer the stories and sub-plots and side quests of The Elder Scrolls series and now the various 3d/first-person Fallout games, graphically they pale in comparison to the Dunia Engine games that Ubisoft has.

One final note about world-size: Daggerfall (the game that preceded Morrowind) has a game world of about sixty two thousand square miles! Compare this to the 15 square miles of Skyrim!

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Hehe yeah Daggerfall, it's the game that really got me started on PC gaming (before that I'd only ever really played consoles). Every time a new TES game came out I was hoping for a repeat of Daggerfall's world and randomly generated dungeons but as the graphics improved, it seemed word size decreased
As for the F3 mods, yeah I got most of those expansion type mods already, including the train carriage interiors

I agree with you about the Dunia engine, I played Far Cry 3 for a bit but lost interest in it about mid way through the story for various reasons that I won't bore everyone here with.
While Bethsoft were really great at world creation, they seem to have lost the ability to craft stories.
I suppose some of the signs were already there, their early dungeons were too "cut & paste" and their storylines could be a little same-same after a while and they really, really, really, REALLY needed to hire extra voice actors instead of overusing the three or four (sarcasm) that they have!

Having said that, Skyrim is a fun world space to wander around in but yes, five minute walks to a major town make it seem very small (pretty much the reason I don't bother with the horses, with a backpack mod and a couple of followers I don't need a horse for carrying extra loot and they don't offer any real advantage in speed when town is five minutes walk away).

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

Hehe yeah Daggerfall, it's the game that really got me started on PC gaming (before that I'd only ever really played consoles). Every time a new TES game came out I was hoping for a repeat of Daggerfall's world and randomly generated dungeons but as the graphics improved, it seemed word size decreased
As for the F3 mods, yeah I got most of those expansion type mods already, including the train carriage interiors

I agree with you about the Dunia engine, I played Far Cry 3 for a bit but lost interest in it about mid way through the story for various reasons that I won't bore everyone here with.
While Bethsoft were really great at world creation, they seem to have lost the ability to craft stories.
I suppose some of the signs were already there, their early dungeons were too "cut & paste" and their storylines could be a little same-same after a while and they really, really, really, REALLY needed to hire extra voice actors instead of overusing the three or four (sarcasm) that they have!

Having said that, Skyrim is a fun world space to wander around in but yes, five minute walks to a major town make it seem very small (pretty much the reason I don't bother with the horses, with a backpack mod and a couple of followers I don't need a horse for carrying extra loot and they don't offer any real advantage in speed when town is five minutes walk away).

Oblivion was terrible about samey-same dungeons; they had ONE person literally design all of the dungeon maps. The only one that Oblivion had going on that wasn't a complete yawnfest was the "Mehrune's Razor" quest. It was a nice sign of "things to come" with Skyrim. Now that has some varied underworld exploration areas.

Again, with the Creation engine allowing world sizes as big as it does it is puzzling as to why they created a "world" that is literally smaller than my subdivision. :/

I felt like Skyrim's stories and side-quests were great, but even though I bought it months and months ago I just cannot get into either Dawnguard or Dragonborn. Maybe I'll feel different after futzing around with FO some.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I agree, with the land mass of Skyrim as big as it is, it's frustrating that they limited the size of the playable world. I have a couple of expansions that require removing the borders (i.e. the invisible walls) on the "edges" of the map. Before I was prepared to remove those borders I tried to collect some info on what it was all about and learnt that the guys who made these expansion mods, did not actually add any new land masses.
They placed their mods on the political borders of Skyrim and used the already in place land mass because the Bethsoft team had created miles and miles of map space around the borders with what appears to be no intention of the players ever getting to access it.

Now you probably know all this already but it was news to me and proved to be a bit of an eye opener. As I understand it, there were some ideas of expanding the playable land mass, hence the amount of mapped areas beyond the invisible walls of Skyrim's borders but the normal business pressures of release schedules & budgets stifled the plan. It's all hearsay but I wouldn't be surprised if it's correct.

There's one modder in particular that set about adding in a few Skyrim towns/villages from the TES Arena map that aren't in TES V. I haven't tried them because I still haven't been able to confirm if these locations conflict with some other mods I'm using. According to the blurb surrounding his mods, the TES V map of Skyrim has been reduced in size compared to the Skyrim that was in Arena.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Well, I think it speaks volumes when you go to the UESP.net site and look at even "smaller" games like Oblivion and see how many dropped quests there are, dungeons that look interesting but when you start looking around, you get the feeling there's supposed to be something there but there isn't, then you do some digging in the various FAQs and wiki pages and lo and behold: "This area was probably supposed to be for a quest, but you cannot open the door/go beyond this set area, and no key for it exists in-game." or they've dug up snippets of conversation that you can't have with people but are in the data files...

And it's not just Bethsoft that does stuff like that; a group of modders found a massive amount of game content in one of the Star Wars RPGs, too: nearly a whole complete questline, just dropped.

Don't even get me started on the material cut from STALKER. That'd be a second game all by itself.

I'd wager there's likewise things like that in FO3, FONV and FO4.

I for one wish the Capitol Wasteland was much larger and bleaker. I liked the "ghost radio stations" for example. Oh well.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I don't know if you've seen the maps used for the Lost Alpha mod for STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (ShoC) but compared to those in vanilla ShoC, they are anywhere between two to four times larger. While the guys who put together the mod added some of their own maps, they used many of the maps from the ShoC 1935 build so you can see that the game was intended to be much broader in scope.

I remember some comment about the GSC team initially wanting to map the entire 30km² area of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone but of course we know how that turned out and they must have made some significant changes to the story to facilitate that (particularly considering the in game idea that you transition from Pripyat to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant from south to north when in the real world it's north to south).

I also vaguely recall that their original idea was that you actually had to sneak into the Cordon area from a separate map i.e. you would start in a "beginning" map and then infiltrate the Cordon map to locate Sidorovich.

Still love the game although I am playing it in modded form and as mentioned, 10 years after it was released (I've played it at least once every year - I'm an obsessed fanboy haha!) But yes, for an "aftermath of the Cold War era" vibe, it hits a lot of the right notes.

[Draq]

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Well, I think it speaks volumes when you go to the UESP.net site and look at even "smaller" games like Oblivion and see how many dropped quests there are, dungeons that look interesting but when you start looking around, you get the feeling there's supposed to be something there but there isn't, then you do some digging in the various FAQs and wiki pages and lo and behold: "This area was probably supposed to be for a quest, but you cannot open the door/go beyond this set area, and no key for it exists in-game." or they've dug up snippets of conversation that you can't have with people but are in the data files...

And it's not just Bethsoft that does stuff like that; a group of modders found a massive amount of game content in one of the Star Wars RPGs, too: nearly a whole complete questline, just dropped.

Don't even get me started on the material cut from STALKER. That'd be a second game all by itself.

I'd wager there's likewise things like that in FO3, FONV and FO4.

I for one wish the Capitol Wasteland was much larger and bleaker. I liked the "ghost radio stations" for example. Oh well.

Fo2 and fonv were rife with incompleteness and dropped/cut content. Still some of my favorite games.

[swaghauler]

Escape from Tarkov looks promising IF they keep developing it as an open world and DON'T go down the dark road to a competitive shooter.