Fallout 3 is largely one of those games that was popularized with Grand Theft Auto 3. The player is to:
Go to an NPC Receive the quest FETCH! Come back at the end for your reward.
Many games have used this basic formula, which is fine because it more or less works. Sometimes, the rewards just don't seem to match up. There's also the one design flaw of non-linear video games where the player ends up doing "errand boy" quests even if they're beneath his character/status at that point. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Fallout 3. I'm merely pointing out some examples of the rewards not matching up.
In the quest called Gallows Humor, the player has to merely talk to two NPCs and gets to collect 1000 caps. What the hell?
In contrast:
- Deactivating the Megaton bomb gets you 100 or 500 caps [detonating the bomb gets you 500 or 1000 caps]
- Galaxy News Radio completion gets you 400 XP and a clue about your dad (or weapons stash) [and the misfortune of GNR being able to broadcast everywhere...not a fan of Three Dog]. Just getting to GNR is a royal pain (tunnel hell + Super Mutant Behemoth)
- Saving Red & Shorty from Super Mutants in Jail up in Big Town/Germantown Police HQ - 300 xp and 200/600 caps
- Getting 20 Chinese Assault Rifles to the guy in Paradise Falls gets you a 20% discount to Pronto's slightly improved crappy inventory
It makes me think of other video game conventions (traditions, not events like E3):
- Bosses taking MULTIPLE full on gunshots to the face (Operation Anchorage - Jingwei comes to mind)
- Inability to climb/crawl
- Invisible walls
- super strength - my small FEMALE character is lugging around 290-300 lbs of gear
- health packs
- computer cheating/being cheap
Again, I'm not really complaining. I've been playing video games since I was four or five years old, currently 28 and no stop in sight.
I'm glad to have found this Fallout universe. I never was a Star Wars/Trek or comic book person. Grand Theft Auto 3 was the first game that got me into video game storylines and such, and the first game that made me "need" to finish most games that I start. Fallout 3 introduced me to the Fallout universe. I'm still not ready to go back and conquer Fallout 1/2, Tactics, or BoS yet, but I am interested in the history. I watched available play-throughs of those games on youtube. I actually remember playing some of Brotherhood of Steel on PS2. That was my REAL first intro to this series. I know I loved the live videos from the game, those old 1940s-50s era videos. The game itself...eh, it was the same engine as X-Men Legends but I couldn't get into that semi-top down view at the time. The runthrough I watched on youtube though, not too bad of a game actually. Masterdirector 14:25, April 30, 2011 (UTC)