When I can play Fallout 3 it is a rather cool game. However, it has some serious glitches. As I noted in a previous post, I can only run it in windowed mode. Once I got it running, I ran into crashing problems when using the VATS. Interestingly, it seems to cause the program to crash when used outside. So far, no problems when it is used indoors during gameplay. Perhaps the larger virtual area is a causal factor?
I’ve also seen some interesting video glitches. When going into the ant lair under the school, some of the ants appeared to be made of glass (that is, they were translucent). There were also some weird effects with the walls. The really annoying effects began when I went to the Super Duper mart. The screen shot below nicely shows how bad it was. The graphics got so bad I could not play the game and had to force it to quit.
I’m sure there is a really good game under these problems and it is a testament to either the underlying game or my own stupidity that I keep trying to make it work.
One of my friends is having no trouble with the game and another friend cannot even get the game to run long enough to leave the vault. I suppose that it is working for enough people that Bethesda’s profits are in no danger.
Naturally, fairness compels me to say that writing games for Windows can be difficult and there are so many PC hardware and software variations that problems are all but unavoidable. That said, all the other games I bought in the past few years have worked just fine.
A patch was released for the game-hopefully that will help with some of the problems.
What are your comp specs? I have had absolutely no glitches up to this point of about 8 hours of gameplay.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Processor 4200+, 2GB RAM, 250 GB SATA II hard drive, and an nVIDIA GeForce 8600 (512 MB). It is running XP Pro (with the Media Center). Not cutting edge, but certainly enough power to run the game (in theory).
Naturally, I checked the system and drive for problems-everything is fine…aside from Fallout 3.
Did you ever get this resolved?
We have a very similar setup with the exact same issues: Updated to latest patch and drivers.
I did, but have long since stopped playing. 🙂
If you could check the temperature of the processor it would be nice. AMDs generate tons of heat. A lack of cooling could be a potential problem. The 8600 card could be part of the problem too. The 8600 has plenty of memory but when you look at the video card’s processor clock speed and memory speed it isn’t so hot. Another problem the card has with high end games is the number of streaming processors the card has. This is very important with high end game video card choice. The streaming processors render the objects in the game. Fallout3 has a ton of objects as you know. These must be rendered real time. The 8600 GT probably has under 100 and I would guess less than 75. The ATI Crossfire card I just bought has over 800 streaming processors. It has made all the diffrence. The card cost me in the neighborhood of 179.00 on Newegg.com. Go on a few of the websites and do the research if you decide to go that route. I play three games hard on the computer. I can tell by the heat the machine generates in the room. They are Fallout3, Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot.
I was walkint twards a old destroyd shed when The game froz for a second then I fell throu the grouund and died.