Fallout 3 Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Fallout Fever

April 22, 2024 by Belghast

The release of the Fallout Amazon Series appears to be a rousing success. It appears that critics across the board have given the show high marks, and similarly, long-time fans of the series are loving it. Tim Cain who worked on the very first Fallout game released his review of the show on YouTube and pretty much gave glowing praise for the level of detail. Sure there has been some minor controversy about the timeline of events and whether or not it reset the timeline of Fallout New Vegas… but overall folks have been happy. I shared my own praise of the show a few weeks back and I feel like I need to watch it again just to soak in all of the detail.

We are now seeing this Fallout love, translating into a rush of players to games like Fallout 76… which never really seemed to find its place and launched with a peak concurrency of 32k players on Steam. Recently it has been breaking those records with a new peak hitting just shy of 73k players. What is even more telling is… Amazon is giving this game away for free through the Microsoft Game Store and these Steam numbers are not even accounting for that. I’ve said recently that it seems to take about two years before a live service game is really worth playing, and now some five years later… Fallout 76 is in prime shape (pun intended) to welcome this influx of players.

The thing is… this isn’t just impacting the live service Fallout offering. The player numbers in Fallout 3 show an over 200% increase, New Vegas around 130% increase, and Fallout 4 similarly around 130% increase. This is translating to more than just players dusting off their existing copies because Fallout games are now seizing spots on the Steam Top Sellers Chart. As of the time of writing this Fallout 76 is 4th, Fallout 4 5th, Fallout 4 GOTY edition 9th, New Vegas 20th, and Fallout 3 GOTY edition down at 48th. I remember the Witcher Netflix series having a similar effect on sales of Witcher 3 boosting it by around 500%. While the Witcher series went off the rails and lost fans in later seasons, this is evidence that a good project surrounding a game will absolutely have deep impact on sales as it brings in a whole new group of fans.

Over the last week or so I have had a number of gamer friends reach out to me for my advice for where to start in their Fallout adventures. Namely how far back they should go… and as much as I hate to admit it my advice has been to skip the first two games unless they are already indoctrinated into the world of 90s CRPGs. The best Fallout game is New Vegas, so I feel like at a minimum everyone needs to play that one. There is merit however to start with Fallout 3, because while it is a very monochromatic wasteland… Three Dog is without a doubt the best DJ. Fallout 4 is a reasonable starting place if you are unwilling to deal with the jank of older games even though it has plenty of that good good Bethesda jank to contend with. My general advice would be to play Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and then Fallout 4 in that order… and if you find yourself craving more then maybe go back and do Fallout 1 and 2 if you can handle the downgrade in tech. Fallout Tactics was a game that I did not enjoy in the least so it isn’t going to get any sort of recommendation from me.

Personally, I find myself sinking further and further into Fallout 76. This is probably a bad starting place for anyone who cares about the story elements of Fallout. The lore of the game feels a bit too malleable, and while I am enjoying myself if you actually care about the story of the world… the other games are a much better option. What I wanted was to explore the content that has been added to this game over the years. I’ve poked at it off and on… and then got into the habit of logging into claim the various offerings throughout the years. However, I’ve never really played it as my main game and I am trying to find my way into that stance. I talked about it quite a bit on the podcast this weekend, but the community is very intriguing.

At some point, I need to dedicate some serious time to building up a proper base. I somehow ended up getting my original destroyed when I tried to move it, but truth be told it was sort of a mess. I would like to actually spend some time building something I am proud of. Above is an older screenshot and quite honestly… I just sort of kept throwing things at it without any real design goals. I’ve found a fairly flat area of land that no one seems to ever have a base… so I am going to attempt to build something more proper there.

Radioactive Nostalgia

April 16, 2024 by Belghast

Over the weekend I finished watching my way through the Amazon Fallout Series and I have to say… It nails the vibe of Fallout perfectly. There are so many things that are just “right” about the world and I have a feeling I am going to have to watch the entire series a few more times before all of them sync in. There are moments like Super Duper Mart that are pulled directly from the games, and then there are just set dressing and elements that are so familiar but not necessarily directly connected. For example the placement of first aid kits on walls in exactly the right location to where you find them in pretty much every fallout game. Then there are the sound effects and quite honestly just by those alone… I know exactly what weapon is being fired at any given time. Someone on this show clearly cared about these details and I greatly appreciate all of the loving work that they did on getting them right.

All of this built a strong desire to dive back in and immerse myself in the Fallout Universe. Now about once a year I end up playing some New Vegas because it is one of my all-time favorite games. Fallout 3 however is a game that I have not replayed in over a decade. So I went through the process of getting it up and running. I tried to install some mods and then got frustrated by the fact that apparently, you need to downgrade the current 2021 client… in order to get most of them to work. So instead I nuked everything and started fresh just playing through the vanilla game of the year client as downloaded from Steam.

I’ve got to be honest… the game as a whole holds up surprisingly well. I mean it still has obtuse gunplay and is full of that good good Bethesda jank, but nothing really felt terribly off from the formula we have all gotten used to. Sure mechanically there are some missing features that we have in the more modern Fallout games like 4 and 76, but mechanically it felt solid. I’ve not played a ton so far, and unfortunately Steam seems to not be able to track actual time spent playing the game and instead tracks time spent with the launcher open. I think if I were to play this further I would need to mod it a bit. I had forgotten just how desolate Fallout 3 looks. In the later titles, they realized that barren wastelands were a bit uninteresting to stare at in 3D, but this first of the modern Fallouts is a bit “spartan”.

Last night I spent some time diving back into Fallout 76. At some point, I completely restarted the game and as such still have a lot of the early quest scaffolding to work my way through. I find myself with the itch to live more in the Fallout world so between 3 and 76 I figure I am probably going to be doing a lot more of that in the coming weeks. 76 is a title that I feel like I have never really gotten into the swing of, so it would be interesting to play it enough to really feel like I am experiencing the benefits of the live service side of things. I know it has been a constantly expanding game over the last few years so it will be cool to get through the original story and see some of the newer stuff.

Have you watched your way through the new Amazon series? What were your thoughts? Has it also prompted you to want to spend more time in Fallout games? Drop me a line below.

SweetFX and ESO

July 15, 2014 by Belghast

Fallout and HDR

Last night when I got home I continued down the dark journey of messing about with Fallout 3 mods and trying to achieve that look I had seen in many screenshots. As of last night I had gotten a “better” looking experience but I wasn’t quite there. It seems like the thing I was missing was one of the many post processing shader injection tools out there. Apparently to get the best possible appearance you need to actually tag team them and use both SweetFX that seems to work with damned near any game, and one called ENB that seems to work with a much smaller subset of games. The above shot was pretty much my first test after turning both on and going with pretty much the stock settings. It is okay but feels a little technicolor, and the sky still seems to be a grey mess.

After trying a few more presets I settled on this one because it feels far more realistic. It is insane to see this game in action with all the shaders running. I am not sure if I can actually record footage and have it capture it in full glory since the screenshots come out a bit darker than it feels on screen. I might do some tests tonight with streaming some gameplay to see if it translates well. For those who are curious I am going to attempt to rattle off the mods that I am using to achieve the look and feel. It is pretty damned impressive that a game from 2008 feels so cool to play. Granted I need to do all the same things to see if I can get a version of Fallout New Vegas that runs this cool, because that game has far more bells and whistles available than Fallout 3.

The Mods Used

When someone posts their spiffy pictures of a modded up Fallout or Skyrim… they never seem to post the absolute list of what they used to get there. It is almost like the special sauce at your favorite restaurant that no one quite wants to give away the trade secret to. It annoys the hell out of me so as I dabbled into modded games I plan to do a complete list with links if they are available to exactly what I am using to get the effects. Here is the total rundown of everything I am using… and compared to a lot of the listings I have seen… this one is fairly spartan. Namely because I am only using graphical mods and none of the various game enhancement ones other than the unofficial patch which ultimately just fixes a bunch of bugs left in the final release of the game.

The only puzzle that still has yet to be solved is that I cannot figure out why I am not seeing the brilliant skies that I have seen in some screenshots. I feel like maybe this is just a problem with the area surrounding Megaton, and as I have not really ventured out further I am not sure if the sky clears up significantly out there. I am pretty happy with the results of this combination of mods and post filtering however. While I enjoy my consoles, this is the reason why PC gaming will always ultimately be superior in the long run. I’ve taken one of my favorite games that just happens to be over six years old… and brought it up to something modern feeling. You just can’t do that with a console game, ultimately because you have to wait for the company to do it… and not the army of dedicated fans.

SweetFX and ESO

The cool thing about SweetFX is like I said before it works with damned near any piece of software. Since you can use a third party software called Radeon Pro to “Inject” it into your video drivers… you can make it work without any actual modification to the original game files. In spite of the name, Radeon Pro works perfectly well with Nvidia cards and I am running it with my 750 ti 2 gig card without issue. This is awesome because it means you can apply it to things like MMOs with some fairly anti-modding terms of service. All you are doing is basically wedging some extra shader work into the rendering pipeline between the game itself and your video drivers. So after some fiddling I found a preset that I liked and am up and running with SweetFX in Elder Scrolls Online. There is talk that you can use one of the versions of ENB designed to work with Skyrim to process the graphics even further, but I have not had the chance to test that out.

So far I am pretty happy with the results… there are times when especially where flame is concerned that some of the lighting gets a bit trippy. But overall I am enjoying running around in a post processing world. The big thing that changes is that the world feels more realistic to me, with far better lighting and shading. The impressive thing is that I really see no noticeable hit to my framerate. In fact it might actually have improved it since I have completely turned off all anti-aliasing because SweetFX is ultimately taking care of that now. I am guessing their processing routines are a bit more efficient than the standard ones that the games seem to use. One of these days I am going to try the trick of running at 1440p and scaling the viewport down to 1080p instead of actually using post processing, but I have not gotten around to trying it yet.

Depths of Madness

When I was not fiddling with graphical settings… which in truth ended up to be most of the night. You can ask PKdude, but I was popping on and offline for damned near all of the night trying out various settings. When I finally got around to questing I completed one of my favorite Auridon quest chains called Depths of Madness. What is cool about it is that you are essentially trying to free three people that are trapped in dimensional sub pockets that have them bound by fear, rage, lust etc. Each one is a little mini adventure that you complete to free the spirit so they can move on. I guess to some extent the quest sequence reminds me quite a bit of the whole madness of king pellagius quest chain from Skyrim. It happens in a super secluded are of the map called Glister Vale and the first few times I played the Auridon content I didn’t actually find it.

I feel like maybe the time away from the game has helped my enjoyment, because the last few nights I have been running around in Elder Scrolls Online I have really enjoyed myself. I am not sure if I am ready to return to group content again, but I am definitely enjoying the slow pace of poking my way through the veteran levels. They still feel super grindy mind you, but so long as I focus on completing quests and not leveling I seem to be doing just fine. As silly as it sounds, I am really enjoying seeing the game with the SweetFX shaders. There are times where Elder Scrolls Online felt a little technicolor for my tastes and this version feels a bit more realistic and gritty. Fallout and Elder Scrolls in general have both been very gritty games… and while I don’t think everything needs the “quake palette” I do think the game feels more realistic with darker tones.

#ElderScrollsOnline #Fallout3

Wandering Auridon

July 14, 2014 by Belghast

Cheating on AggroChat

I don’t believe I said anything about this beforehand, but once again I was invited to guest host on Game On the MMORPG.com podcast hosted by @GameByNight and @Liores. I guess this means I didn’t make an ass of myself the first time they had me on. I have a lot of fun doing the podcast with them, because since I have known both for quite some time… it just feels like having a conversation with friends. This time around they also invited @AppleCiderMage so it was awesome getting to properly meet and hang out with her as well. The two of us have operated in the same circles for awhile, but never really had any direct interaction other than through twitter.

The podcast generally releases around Wednesday and I will post a link when it is up and ready to go. I feel like we maybe derailed the podcast, because they had this long list of things to talk about and I think maybe we got through three of them in the allotted time. Then again anyone who has listened to AggroChat should know that I can ramble on about nothing at length. AppleCider held up her end of the rambling as well, and I feel like the two of us combined pushed the train good and solidly off the rails. That said it was a blast to do it, and I look forward to maybe filling in again sometime in the future. I have to say though that since we record AggroChat on Saturday nights, it was weird to get up the next morning and prepare to do another podcast.

Wandering Auridon

While waiting around on podcast time I decided to stream a little Elder Scrolls Online. The other day I was absolutely shocked that someone posted on my youtube channel asking why I had stopped playing. It made me realize just how much time had passed since I had streamed anything, let alone Elder Scrolls Online. I guess maybe I am poking my head out of turtle mode, because streaming didn’t seem that bad yesterday. I am still poking my way around Auridon working on the quests there. In the video I play for roughly an hour and complete a couple of different quest chains. Most of my morning however was spent trying to sort out my addons. It seems like recently they had a patch that broke several of the addons that I was using. The weird thing about it is that several of the addons were apparently working, but being suppressed by other addons that were not.

While I still really enjoy Elder Scrolls Online, it had been quite some time since I had logged in. I of course logged into a mail message from my research assistant, but the one prior to that was from 19 days ago, so that means I had been offline for at least that long. The pace of the veteran content is a bit of a problem to be honest. While it is enjoyable to quest my way through the Aldmeri content that I had not seen… in the video I complete a handful of quest chains and my experience bar makes no noticeable movement. It gets frustrating to feel like you are making no forward momentum as you quest your way around the world. I talk about that a bit on the Game On podcast but when you move into veteran content it feels like you get stuck on high center. There are some rather sweeping changes coming in August, so here is hoping it improves the feel of the veteran experience.

Modding Fallout 3

The other day I stumbled across a series of pictures of a completely modded out Fallout 3 install. This combined with me playing some FO3 on the PS3 made me want to try playing the game with the same visual effects as shown in those photos. While I am getting closer, I can’t seem to get the visual splendor shown there. Right now I think I have all of the mods mentioned in the description installed and it looks much better than a default install, but something is still missing. Namely the sky is still the ominous grey blob that it has been on previous plays of the game. I am wondering if this is just a side effect of being in the Megaton area, and as I move out into the game proper maybe that changes. In any case I am going to keep trying to mod it until I can achieve the kind of clarity that you see in the images.

Other major change this play through is that I am trying to stick to using the Xbox 360 controller. Basically I have reached a point where I feel like the mouse and keyboard artificially limit me in the number of games that I can play. Right now the consoles seem to be the primary target for game developers, and the PC market gets ports namely, and that means all of these interfaces are designed with a controller in mind… and then later retrofitted to work with a keyboard and mouse. I feel like at this point I need to teach myself to be better at using a controller or ultimately there will reach a point where my chosen way of gaming is no longer supported. Hell to be honest it feels like the keyboard and mouse thing is already a rarity among anything that is not an MMO. With games like Destiny looming on the horizon, I feel like training myself to get by with only the controller is going to be a good thing… and I will go through the growing pains with games that I am already very familiar with before branching out on new titles that I am not.

#Fallout3 #ElderScrollsOnline