There's a reason why one does not buy Bethesda games on consoles. It mostly has to do with their having little taste for such things as 'production value', or 'well-thought-out design', which means player modders have to come in and fix their damned game for them.

I like when you say "one" when you clearly mean "I", and I like how I say "like" when I clearly mean "don't like". Bethesda is a great developer, and their problems are only ever a byproduct of their ambition.

And if they truly had "little taste" for polish and good game design, then I doubt they would be hiring the modders that fixed their game for them.

Anyway, what does this have to do with trees being added to the game? Are you implying that Bethesda left out foliage not because they were trying to create an aesthetic fitting for a post-apocolyptic futurescape, but because they were lazy?

All kinds of dumb going on up in here...all kinds...

I like trees.

I really need to play this game i have had it since it was released and havent made it past megaton. Its so big that i dont want to really get into it untill i can play it all thru. but i dont do mods too much i prefer to play the game the way it was meant to be played. IF i do use mods it is only multiplayer mods like the millions in hafllife2 but there are just far too many out there

Um, Tom? Oasis?

@Poohead
Nice try, but no. It has nothing to do with trees and everything to do with buying blatantly broken games on console with no way to fix them. The games are broken on PC too, of course, but there at least if you wait long enough you can find fixes. And just in case your little hackles were raised by the notion, it has nothing to do with PC superiority -- I'm a console gamer primarily, but still I know better than to buy a Bethesda game for a platform that doesn't support mods.

As for their being great developers, let's look back at their pattern of work: they create games with incredible breadth and scope, but then forget to, you know, make nice-looking textures, or models, or animations. We can forgive Bethesda, because I certainly know that if not for them Fallout 3 wouldn't exist, but let's not pretend like these problems don't exist -- we're not game reviewers, are we?

Now, their being inept is endearing and, apparently, common to RPG developers. Black Isle, Troika, Obsidian, they also were incredibly uneven, technically. But they tried so hard, bless their little hearts, and after thousands of fans get their grubby hands into these games they start to work like they were supposed to in the first place. Bioware used to be the exception, but even they've lost that edge these days.

I think the games are fine without any mods. I enjoyed both, particularly Oblivion, on the 360. Maybe I'm just not "angry video game nerd" enough to get worked up over some blurry textures or unrealistic animations.

That said though this mod looks awesome.

You all do realize that his mod has been around for a while, right?

I honestly have no idea what obonicus is on about. I've played Oblivion and I've played Fallout 3 and they're both very entertaining and very playable right out of the box. I've also recently played Mass Effect, Halo 3, and Gears of War, and I don't consider Fallout 3 or Oblivion substandard in the least.

>wonder what kind of radioactive wasteland has trees in it?

Plants are much more likely to thrive than humans -- in fact, you'd expect the world of fallout to be more like 'The World Without Us' than a wasteland. Especially considering the timeframes involved in Fallout.

Plants would be the first things to come back after a nuclear apocalypse. If radiation levels are low enough for people to be walking around with dying, there would certainly be plants again. Unless it never rains.

Or what?

Could be a GECK!

It was the Genesis Torpedo. But nice reference.

I actually understand where obonicus is coming from.
There were several instances in the game wherein I witnessed a texture blur or a graphics error that made me stop playing and scratch my head for a several minutes. More than once I witnessed magical walls of darkness emanating from the cartridges of the NPCs' guns, blotting out the landscape whenever I looked in their direction. In other times, I would simply clip through a rock and become stuck. No warning, no signs of a glitch before hand. Bethesda simply refused to finish that particular rock I stepped on, so I'd have to reload my saves as there was no way to extricate my lower body from the landscape.
Fallout 3 is a wonderful game, but it still has plenty of problems. It's a shame I bought it for the 360....

As a counterpoint to you anti-Fallout goofballs -- you people have your own clubs, don't you? -- I'd just like to say I've played through the game on the PC and against maybe half-way through on the 360. In all those hours, Ive never seen any such errors. It's a wonderful game whose biggest glitch is that there are a doofuses have a vendetta against it. Maybe a patch can fix that.

Why would anyone want trees in Fallout?

This isn't Disneyland, it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland!

@Greg: yup. best moment of the whole sorry game.

I've never experienced these errors either, but I wonder what it is that makes these errors for some games and not others in the first place? Surely it can't be the game, because if it's all the same copy then in theory if it works correctly for some people it should work correctly for all?

It's usually the hardware. Every computer has an almost unique combination of hardware components and drivers. You can test a game on thousands of different PCs, but there will be still countless possible combination that might possibly cause an error.
If the developwer was good, that's the reason a game needs patches. (If they were bad, they just didn't finished the programming).

I agree with Tom on this one. Most games that sport the scope and scale that Bethesda titles tend to, have their fare share of bugs and glitches. I think that it comes with the territory and, for me at least, it's an acceptable--albeit unfortunate--part of the transaction. I've experienced all sorts of problems: weird A.I. behavior, strange texture problems, and the extremely rare game-breaking, loading-an-earlier-save-is-the-only-solution glitch.

But I've experienced these in lots of different games. For whatever reason (maybe something to do with the demographic that Bethesda games attract or something), Bethesda games seem to get lampooned more often, and Bethesda is accused of being a developer that makes basically broken games. Game glitches suck, and I'm not pretending that they don't exist. I simply don't understand why Bethesda gets this "special treatment".

And everyone seems to be forgetting that the game does get patched for the consoles in precisely the same way that it gets patched for the PC.

Thanks Yora!

Tom, I'd say I resent being called a goofball, but when you use insults that are just so gosh darn cute, it's hard to stay angry.

Don't get me wrong, it's an excellent game. the fact that you can decapitate nearly everyone you meet(intentionally or not) is really entertaining, and being able to stumble around a surreal wasteland of areas you're familiar with in real life is fascinating.

Sometimes it feels like Fallout is a really polarizing game. There are people that laud it as the god of storylines and content, and there are others who say that it's inherently flawed and that it doesn't deserve any praise at all. I suppose there are people like this for every game; at least the middle men are happy.

"Why would anyone want trees in Fallout?

This isn't Disneyland, it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland!"

I don't want to spoil the ending of the game, but something along these lines might almost be expected. If the game didn't just decided to end and be done with it.