From the puzzling shotgun incompetence of Master Chief to the severe lack of pocket-space in Homefront, disgruntled gamer Dave ‘Mack’ McConkey has suffered through the most infuriating ammo systems that the shooter genre has to offer. Here, he sounds off on the issue – and suggests how things can be improved.
The artist behind Fallout 4’s Deathclaw reveals just how bad things got back when Bethesda took over the series
People are stupid I get it. No one should feel unsafe,
But I think they need to talk about why they cut so many corners during the development process and why none of their games ever look current. And why they think all of this is okay while they charge full price.
As much as Bethesda deserve criticism, that's not really relevant to the reveal of Fallout 3 in 2007.
Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG remains an unabashed classic, more than a decade and a half on from its launch.
For me its the fact that I could put hundreds of hours into it and still find areas I missed in my earlier runs. It was also my first FO and despite what I had to put up with at times such as overall crashs and killing my orginal PS3 with the YLOD it's still my favorite entry to this day.
Tons of reasons
But my silly little one…hunting for unique weapons and armour
Something Fallout 4 just didn’t really have as much because they replaced most of it with randomly generated customised weapons. Even Elder Scrolla doesn't do it as well.
I remember during my first playthrough of Fallout 4 back in 2015 I somehow got an automatic combat rifle that shot explosive rounds by defeating a legendary creature. Unfortunately that was the only playthrough I ever got that weapon. It's a shame because it was absolutely epic!
Sense of exploration. That was why older Bethesda games were so good. They might have had glitches, broken mechanics, meh visuals, etc., but they were some of the best around when it came down to the sense of exploration. You could go wherever you wanted and you would find something cool; it might have been a faction, a weapon, an enemy and much more. And that is what they are lacking now. Skyrim still had a lot of that, but Fallout 4 dropped it by focusing on an interconnected world and more randomly generated rewards. Fallout 76 just kept that trend and added multiplayer, and Starfield went even further in killing it by creating a whole universe with parts completely isolated from each other.
I think the retrospective of Fallout: New Vegas' existence has somewhat diminished the view of Fallout 3 in the eyes of many, but it getting out of the vault in Fallout 3 was, for me, the most remarkable experience I've had in a videogame.
I was 12 when it came out, and I remember I just saw the score it got in Gamemaster magazine (remember those!? 😅), and I just went to the shop and bought it with my pocket money.
Not knowing anything about the game, I thought the whole thing was going to be about growing up in a vault, especially given that I'd spent about 2 hours in it....I literally could.not.believe it when you got out and it was just this wasteland on every direction. Amazing.
Probably because these Bethesda games were hand crafted so that exploration meant something. Unlike Starfield where this sense of exploration is replaced with the illusion of scope and procedurally generated worlds. A player can always appreciate when they wonder into an unforgettable new encounter by accident or stumble across a new questline that becomes their favourite. Just like a player can always tell when they're ploughing through filler on auto pilot, that they'll forget the moment some resource numbers go up and nothing worth remembering occurred.
I mean, in Fallout 3 you could nuke an entire town as a SIDE QUEST. In The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Skyrim, the Dark Brotherhood questlines were my favourite in any RPGs and you could completely avoid them if you didn't care for them. In The Witcher 3 side quests take you on ridiculously dark and mysterious storylines that are some of the best I've played in RPG history. There's a reason why people still talk about KOTOR to this day. Difference between a developer creating something or just padding a game world with stuff.
There were some side quests that could yld have been developed into an entirely separate game. Some great writing there.
The Fallout Anthology Edition is coming to PC very soon, and is packaged with some very S.P.E.C.I.A.L. bonuses.
It’s an awful downgrade to the last one they did
They included physical disc back then
I would love the classic fallout games on console. Closest I could find was atom rpg, I liked that one a lot
Fallout has the system correct.you can only carry so much weight, and even a well maintained gun has to be repaired more often then the older the gun becomes, and the more the gun is used.
Good lord some of the things people will complain about.
this guy doesn't know what he's talking about... 90 rounds is already quite a few rounds to carry into combat if you have an assault rifle. you do have a few pockets, but one goes for grenades, one for gas mask, then I still had one for my glasses/food/camo makeup/flashlight... you can only carry 3-4 more clips if you want to be fully loaded.
whether you agree with the article or not, i don't have strong opinions either way, it was a damn entertaining read.
I love how I get lambasted for commenting on the non-realistic games, by commenters who are using the realistic games as a counter argument. I actually think that BF3 or MW or whatever actually have the ammo requirements right.
As for those who think that a real soldier will go into battle with 90 spare bullets, here is some numbers for you to crunch:
The standard loadout of a British soldier in Afghanistan will walk out the gates of his FOB carrying (at a minumum) 6 magazines (180 rounds) plus a bandoleer with another 180 rounds, plus additional ammo for the section or platoon support weapons (link ammunition for the GPMG/LMG, mortar bombs for the 51 or 61ml platoon mortar, grenades for the UGL, additional loose ammo for their rifle etc.)
Finally, I am not confused by Hollywood portrayals of fire fights. A soldier firing on rapid fire (single shot, 2 rds per second) will empty a mag in 15 seconds. With six full mags a soldier will be out of ammo and have to re-bomb his mags in less than three minutes. On auto, they could burn through their ammo in less than a minute (in theory, not accounting for the time it takes to reload).
It is true that a soldier carries over 100+ pounds of kit, but actually a lot of this is ammunition. I can give you a detailed breakdown of a riflemans kit on patrol in Afghan if you wish. But I tell you it does not include a ‘gas mask’ (which incidentally have not been seen since WW1 – soldiers these days use respirators when faced with a CBRN environment). Idiot.