You're not the only one, but that ship has sailed and I'm over it at this point. Otherwise, I thought F3 had the single worst ending of any game I had played in 20 years when it came out, but I really enjoyed New Vegas. So who knows.
Honest question here, not flamebaiting: did you dislike both the ending without DLC and the ending with Brotherhood of Steel? I'm just curious which part you did or didn't like. Without the DLC it was definitely a bummer having no real consequences so it may as well have been a Game Over screen, but with the DLC it gave you two different continuations of the open world.
Bethesda's Terminator: Future Shock should have stolen so much of any other contemporary shooter's thunder. True 3D, WASD, drivable vehicles, wide open levels, man. This is a game that is sadly, sadly forgotten. Like System Shock, I don't think the world was quite ready for it.
Oh this was definitely upon initial release without the DLC. Aside from the lack of consequences, I had spent the game with the supermutant companion and him refusing to take the radiation dose was such a blatant, stupid, railroading that I gave up on any dlc.
That's fair. It might be worth giving it another go with the BoS DLC at least. Fawkes will still say no (I mean the point of the game is that YOU are the hero/anti-hero) so that won't change. To be honest I didn't care much for the companions in F3 except Dog, but then he was the one who got killed really easily due to things like buggy aggro- and pathfinding. So I toughened my resolve, wiped the single tear from my eye, and mastered the wastelands alone.
Brotherhood of Steel and The Pitt were great. Point Lookout was good but the enemies were so effing hard it basically became a huge sneaking level for me (though it wasn't a negative per se and had I gone in with a different build might have been mrore fight-y). Mothership Zeta was completely forgettable to me except that it added more energy weapons which happened to work out for me because that was my Glitter Boy playthrough.
looks like it's done by Rob Liefeld. it's amazing how his left arm is about a foot longer than his right arm. The way the artist obscure the feet is also similar to Liefeld, since he can't draw feet.
I loved Point Lookout since it added a lot of places to explore which was the main strength of FO3. Mothership Zeta was short but I really liked the characters in it.
Fawkes can and will do your dirty work with the Broken Steel DLC installed. I haven't the foggiest idea when that changed but for my recent replay every option I figured should be available to me very definitely was available. If you can forgive Bethesda their initial bumbling, it's well worth having another go at FO3.
Actually, this was explained in a developer interview: Now obviously, this turned out to be a horrible screwup on Bethesda's part, and the subsequent rationalisation in the interview is equally lame... but it wasn't intended as an exercise in bloody-mindedness. Incidentally, the post-Broken Steel FO3 ending is actually one of my favourites in gaming. And no, I'm not trolling. The short explanation is...
I actually think The Pit DLC is the best Fallout content Bethesda has ever produced. Anchorage and Spaceship Z or horrishit. The main quest in Fallout 3 is a botched bastard amalgamation of Fallout 1 & 2. (and Tactics!) Also the ending is so abysmally bad I succeeded in convincing my friend to never finish the game at the time. (I think he did finish it post DLC after they unfucked it)
See, I'm not a big fan of The Pitt. Mainly because depending on the faction you choose to ally with you end up with either a bunch to do or very little at the end. Seemed like an odd choice. Operation Anchorage has its issues, mainly because they started off trying to do some sort of RTS thing and then just settled for a corridor shooter. That leave Broken Steel and Point Lookout as my favorite DLCs. Ending on Mothership Zeta was a downer, though. Another corridor shooter, mainly, and a bit too 50s sci-fi goofy, even if the series allows for that. On the whole I was pretty happy with Fallout 3. It's the only game in recent memory I can think of where I played to the end and then started over for another complete playthrough since you would hit the original level cap after doing about 60% of content. New Vegas has its pluses, but in the end it wasn't so much post-apoc as a frontier western with Fallout stuff in terms of the setting. I often wonder what Obisidan could have done had they been allowed greater freedom in choosing the setting. They admitted in an interview after New Vegas was announced that they had originally proposed doing an original story (i.e. not a follow-up to Fallout 1 and 2) in a new location set earlier in the timeline but that Bethesda insisted on only going forward time-wise and wanted to reserve the proposed location for themselves.
The Pitt was sort of mediocre and had a shitload of bugs. If only we knew it was preparing us for Fallout:NV.
I just think it was a bad design. And it's not like the section before that was some great design either - oh great, I lost all my gear. Oh hey, lets run around a junkyard fighting ghouls. Bleh. We've traveled to an entirely new city and I'm pretty sure it was physically smaller then just about all the other DLCs.
If you had it on PC, the best thing to do with Dog was to use the console and enable the command "setessential" along with whatever his character code was. That way rather than die he/she just gets knocked out. In fact, all of my companions were set to being essential. Might as well cheat the system to make up for the crappiness that was babysitting the followers.
Meh, who knows. I really did enjoy the game until the end, so I may end up getting the GOTY edition at some point when it's deeply discounted. Set course for Steam Sale!
To be fair, it had some really awful bugs when it first launched, like falling even the smallest distances was fatal. It made navigating the world deadly, you had to go down stairs slowly, or you'd die! But it really did do some amazing things.
I ended up not really using companions in FO3, mostly because I didn't find them very compelling as characters, and they tended to interfere with my sneaky-sneaky-bypass-combat strategy. I liked The Pitt a lot, mostly because it brought back some of the moral ambiguity that I think characterizes the Fallout series. I have mixed feelings about Future Shock. It did a lot of things well, but it never quite managed to come together for me as a cohesive game experience, so I never really felt invested in the gameplay.
Sneaking is why I always used Charon since he's the toughest of the powerful companions that can stealth alongside you effectively. Also because he's a supreme badass. I made him wear power armor though because he's an uggo.
I never used companions in either 3 or NV. They always get in the way. Even the really cool sniper guy in NV, who's headshots are grandmaster level, did not meet my strict standards for not being in my way, ever. Unless 4 has a literally incorporeal companion that doesn't mind being shot at and I can walk/see through him, I doubt they will have improved companion AI at all. Also, I will probably buy 4 if they can make it more like NV instead of 3.
I always find that it is my solemn duty to stay out of Fawkes way. One simply does not deter or otherwise interfere with the big man while he runs around murdering everything with a pulse.
Poor Boon :( I kept him around for most of my playthrough because I tended not to notice that he was murdering shit while I was murdering shit, as he usually murdered the shit I wasn't murdering.
I liked Boon a lot. On my first playthrough I was playing a snipery gungo-ho NCR character and Boon and I worked great together mailing long range death-grams to Ceasar's legions. On my subsequent playthrough as a bad guy it was great fun tricking Boon into murdering another NCR member then blasting him out the mouth of the T-rex.
Oh that's just a feature they brought forward from Fallout 2. Oh look, Sulik is good with submachineguns! Lets give him one. (Next combat): no Sulik, stop burst firing at me!!!
