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I'm playing it quite a bit atm - more than WoW.
It's really very amazing - very expansive, tremendous detail, excellent writing and voice-acting. The character development and dialogue is very well scripted - I like how sometimes, negotiating isn't as simple as being polite; the dialogue is very psychological and plausible. The action is very open ended, I love how creative the player can be in solving problems. It lends itself to Aestu-style gameplay: obsessive and smugly efficient.
The weapon choices are well-balanced and lend themselves to many different playstyles. Personally I prefer small-arms. Itemization in the game is very diverse and almost everything can be sold or has some use. Inventory management and money sense are key.
The downsides: It's enormously annoying that the camera angle and cursor can't be freely adjusted from character facing. The game has a very large number of minor but profoundly inconvenient bugs, which can be corrected on-the-fly via debug on PC version only, so I recommend you not get the console versions. For example, critical NPCs often die or wander off the world, and you may not discover they have done so until many gameplay hours after they have; you must either proceed through the game with dramatically limited options, start over, or use the debug to fix it.
On all but the hardest difficulty, % chance to hit a body part is fully normalized, meaning you have the same chance to hit a torso as you do a head or an object the size of a quarter. Even on the hardest difficulty the probability difference is so marginal that headshots are ridiculously overpowered, even for robots, since armor is calculated independently for each hardpoint. The game's targetting system is somewhat buggy and there are often issues with objects and friendlies getting caught in crossfire, or impeding what is supposed to be a 100% hit.
Because unit health is debited by the net damage done to each hardpoint after mitigation, targets can be killed entirely through damage to the limbs. Crippling and shooting weapons away are ridiculously overpowered; it's frustrating you can't actually shoot an opponent's legs off so they're fully immobile, you can only cripple their legs then spend five minutes and hundreds of rounds backpedal-kiting them to death.
It is also a major nuisance that since the camera isn't freely adjustable, you must play in first-person perspective, but your weapon model isn't normalized, so some of the guns, even a rifle, may take up a good 25% of the screen, obscuring your view unless you change or sheath your weapon.
The windowed mode doesn't work properly; you can't maximize the window without doing something in Windows I don't know of or how to do, and the only way to work with other programs while playing the game is alt-tabbing; you can't freely move the cursor out of the window. When you alt-tab, it instantly pauses the game, so it's not possible to multitask, which is also annoying.
Mob pathing is fairly bad and kiting/strafing is very overpowered. You can often kill even the strongest opponents just by exploiting their huge hitboxes and slow turn speed, or by faking them back and forth around rocks. It also takes a ridiculous number of shots to kill anything; even the weakest humanoids can take several headshots to kill.
Potions are cheap and have no cooldown, so anything that does not kill you instantly will never kill you at all. Therefore, the player very rarely dies, even on the hardest difficulty, unless he does something monstrously stupid. Overall it's a very easy game, provided you have half a brain.
On lower difficulty levels, the AI is suicidally aggressive; on harder difficulty levels, it's more cautious, which is self-defeating because the AI-controlled opponents are numerically much stronger on harder difficulties, so by being cautious, the mobs allow the player to survive and control them to a greater extent than on easier difficulty levels. Generally speaking, the AI is very detailed and responsive but too predictable. The AI doesn't have many random elements to its behavior.
Because there is no aggro, mobs attack whatever is nearest them, so kiting mobs into other mobs that are hostile to them is very overpowered. You can kite two robots, a super mutant, and some animals into each other, sit and wait, finish off the last one standing, then loot everything.
The main storyline doesn't branch naturally into the myriad sidequests that make up about 95% of the game's content, so you need to have a fair degree of initiative to see and do everything in the game.
Quite a bit of the game takes place in enclosed areas such as subways and caves, and combined with the moving 3D first person perspective, it can aggravate allergies to such perspectives. I try to avoid those areas because they cause me to suffer fevers and nausea.
Many of the people and places aren't intuitive and the clues presented to the player are often wholly insufficient to figure out the who, when, what, where, how and whys. It was very obviously written to require the strategy guide - but the Fallout Wiki is very good and I simply turned to that when I needed info.
You'll like it or you won't. There's some learning curve when it comes to the perspective and limitations of the interface, and as I said, you need to have a naturally curious and self-starting playstyle to really get into it.
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
Last edited by Aestu on Mon Aug 23, 2010 12:04 am, edited 4 times in total.
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