flalotu 3’s biggest problem is that for all the effort they put into making the world aesthetically intimidating it’s really not that harsh or unforgiving.
like i remember in the original flalutos how you could just say the wrong thing to the wrong person and his five buddies would shoot you to death before you even got another turn. you might be wandering in a dangerous part of the desert without knowing it and get hopelessly surrounded by giant fucking radscorpions and that would be the end of you. it was a hard world to be in and you had to play things smart to survive. the game wasn’t doing you any favors.
but in flatoul 3 you aren’t really so vulnerable. only in the very beginning are you really at serious risk, because you only have a bb gun and a pistol with a couple bullets. that was awesome! i thought the whole game would be like that and it would be like the road and you’d have to be smart and sneaky and conservative but i was wrong because literally five minutes later you find megaton and have access to ammunition. also, achievement unlocked
to their credit bethesda greatly reduced the scaling difficulty from retarded badgame oblvioni, so even though it’s in place, there’s definitely places you don’t wanna go at a low level. idk why they didn’t just get rid of it altogether, but probably because they’re bethesda and actually unable to make a game without serious holdout flaws from the previous one. the problem is that there’s a weird lack of transition between easy enemies and hard ones. a couple hours into the game you’ve put on a few levels, and you’ve been into the city so you’ve gotten all the ammunition you’ll ever need, and you find you can easily deal with any encounters with raiders, bounty hunters, and wildlife. but if you go north and run into yao gui (yaoi?) you can die pretty easy, you aren’t strong enough yet. so for a long time you feel like a big kid playing in the little kids’ sandbox and just wrecking all their castles and it gets boring after a while because what you really want to do is play on the jungle gym, but you can’t, because there’s bullies over there.
but also at this point you start to realize that there’s no real entropy in the game. there isn’t a lot of incentive to do anything except the desire to explore. you don’t need to eat or drink or sleep to survive, which is stupid in a post-apocalyptic rpg, so the only resource you need to manage is your money and weapons. and really you don’t need money because you get to a point where you pick up more bullets from enemies than you spend killing them, and you can just repair your own guns with the ones they dropped. and all exploring does is get you… more guns, and armor. in fact i would go so far as to say that at least half of the skills in the game are totally useless because if you put everything into small guns, repair, and lockpicking you’ll be set for the whole game.
but back to entropy. radiation is played up to be this big deal right. like sometimes you’ll be wounded and the best way to get health back is to drink from a fucking toilet (how is the water still running) but the downside is you get radiation. but that’s not really a downside when radiation is so easy to deal with. rad-away is found everywhere and cheap enough to buy that you never even really need to go to the doctor, but either way, you instantly get rid of your radiation. i can’t even tell you what the downside to being radiated in llafout 3 is because i never really was radiated, it’s so easy to get rid of. hp issues are dealt with as part of the radiation cycle (drinking) so that’s not a big deal either. by making the downside of these actions so easy to deal with, bethesda cheapens the gameplay in general by reducing the importance of intelligent decision making.
apparently in the next game there will be a hardcore mode where you have to eat and drink to stay alive and stuff. i can only hope it turns out to be good. but i don’t really know how to hope anymore
