i think there are several mis-communications going back and forth... heh. i was replying to both you and sahib at the same time. the engine comment was directed at your comment, and the rushed comment was directed at sahib, hence the quotations.
i understood that; i just don't know how they'd go about quantifying the impact of sound, since it's a variable that also sensitive to the amount of force applied to the analog stick (at least when using a game controller. not sure about a keyboard). i'd just use common sense in this case -- heavy armor will negatively affect sneak in a big way.
yeah, we do. item descriptions and the like are not polish, they're icing. they're a nice little bonus, but i don't think they are the mark of a polished game. in my eyes, polish is the game working properly and the game being presented well. we also disagree on the dialogue. i don't think it's as bad as you make it out to be. there's a lot of character and variation between the people you meet in fallout 3 -- it's not like oblivion at all in this regard.
here's the only picture i could find showing the item screen on the pipboy. where exactly do you want to squeeze in an item description? the left side is taken up by your list of items. the bottom right has the item effects. the top right has the controls for the pipboy. i suppose that bethesda could have squeezed a sentence or two below the item effects, or removed the vaultboy picture and placed two or three sentences there. but the screen would look really crowded. i just don't see where these would go. i'll bet that bethesda just made a decision about what necessary information they wanted to communicate via the pipboy. in all honesty, descriptions of 10mm pistols and assault rifles are unnecessary bonuses. the item names are pretty self-explanatory. to say that fallout 3 lacks polish because it lacks these descriptions is very nitpicky.

A compendium of small Fallout 3 videos I have made thus far!
Death Claw Shenanigans!
Stuck Somewhere Up North
I blew up Megaton
Don't Sleep on The Megaton Bed, IN PC VERSION
Brotherhood of Steel Glitch
Stuck on The BEd in MEgaton, Xbox 360 Version

Coming out of Vault 101 I was excited at what I saw. Then as I walked down a main street and saw no enemies, I wondered, then I got to the sign saying 'Megatron' and walked toward it over the rocks, thinking 'I am bound to get attacked now I have left the road', but I wasn't. Then I found Megaton and went in and the sherrif met me and I thought 'ok'. Then I got to the Megaton Bar and heard Mr. Burke speak - it was the Dark Brotherhood invitation guy from Oblivion! I then turned to Gob the barman and heard the Argonian voice actor! Immersion went out of the window and all of a sudden I was dispirited, thinking 'is this going to happen every time I start getting immersed in the game?'
I am soldiering on, but that initial enthusiasm on leaving Vault 101 has been evaporated somewhat.
With no construction set and a world on 9/10th's as big as Oblivion, which was smaller than Morrowind, which was smaller than Daggerfall, I cannot see me putting th time into this that I put into Oblivion. Bethesda seems to be agreeing with talk of Fallout 4 being out as soon as 2010. With no construction set, hence few mods, I don't see the interest lasting even that long!
I would say to watch out for the Fallout Retrospective video on Gametrailers. It has detailed conversations about the endings of both Fallout 1 and 2 and has no Spoiler Alert whatsoever!
Also, regarding Oblivion's leveling system and other problems. With the multitude of mods, because of the Construction Set, all thses problsm were solved. A great mod called Martign's Monster Mod added tons of new creatures, entirely tweaked creature AI and a whole new levelling system that meant, for example, a wolf could be spawned weak, cowardly and small, so would likely run away, or it could be spawned big and starving i9n which case it would attack. This took away 'levelling' as such, making the game much more organic. It also made creatures tougher the more you went into the wilderness, meaning as a low level player, staying near the towns and roads meant safety. But later quests that took you more into the wilderness would mean meeting stronger enemies. It's mods like this, continually updated with new creatures, etc, that mean I still play Oblivion to this day,
With no Construction Set and therefore much fewer mods, we cannot hope for mods like MMM for Fallout 3, and I cannot expect to be playing Fallout 3 four years after the game was released, like I am with Oblivion. I would go so far as to say Oblivion is seen as a great game because of the mods. And if all we had all these years was the vanilla game, it would not be held in such high regard.

.. Does immersion go away every time you see a same actor in a movie? :D I think it's more about your attitude than anything else...
And what's so wrong with no attacks, anyway? :D
Oh, by the way, a very few MODs are already out - check Fallout Series board, Fallot 3 MODs topic

WOAH! I am having DEJA VU!
This same exact thing was discussed on the Fallout boards topic on this. I agree with Fenixp, seeing the same actor in a movie, even if it's a different movie but made by the same guy, does not ruin immersion. Take for Example, Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi, and Spider Man. Bruce Campbell plays a different role in every Spiderman film, directed by Sam Raimi, did that ruin immersion for millions of Spiderman fans? No. I can understand how it might have ruined immersion for one person though, and a few here or there. But to say that it is automatically a poor quality because your sense of immersion was removed, is a little far out there. You have to judge things on your own experience, and try not to generalize.
you might say 'but weclock, nowhere did I explicitly say, that immersion would be ruined for everyone! Infact I explicitly said my immersion was what was affected!'
That is true, however Fenixp quite clearly misconstrued your words. I haven't -1'd you, infact I +1'd you.

Interactive entertainment, like video games, are very different form passive entertainment like movies. A better example would be using Homer Simpson's voice over the top of the Cowboy in Toy Story. You could not believe in that cowboy toy because you would always be thinking of the Simpson's
And no attacks or even seeing creatures at a distance makes you think of an empty world and wonder if the game's going to be like that a lot. I think most people between Vault 101 and Megaton expected to be attacked as they walked between the two.
By the way, if you get any -1's for your comments, they weren't from me. I don't give -1's just because someone disagrees with me.

Wait a minute - for me, it's absolutely obvious that when a developer decides to publish his game it has to be working properly out of the box. Are you saying that a properly working game is something we have to be grateful for? I mean - for crying out loud - I pay and I expect a working product. It's as if you would say "this car is polished because it actually works and doesn't explode at ignition". You spent your money on the damn thing - it has to work.
Since when is Oblivion an example to compare to anything? F3 is advertised as RPG and I expect RPG-like dialogues - Planescape Torment, BG 2 or at least as good as previous Fallouts. Not yes/yes/I kill you/directions. Compare F3 to those RPG classics.
Reading this comment I had a vision of Bethesda downloading fan-made png's of pipboy from the internet and struggling to put any information there. Come on - they designed the look of pipboy - if they wanted to, they could've made room for descriptions.
Yup, they made a decision that is quite the opposite of how inventory was handled in previous parts of Fallout. Why? I don't know, maybe they thought they knew better. I - for one - am seriously missing all of the descriptions. Yes, even those "unnecessary bonuses". Those descriptions were one of the things that constructed the whole "feeling" of F1 & F2. I could've forgiven them this decision if the rest of the game was perfect - unfortunately it's not.

I wouldn't really care, I'm very, very tolerant person :D But, sure, it can ruin the game for some of us, I must admit... One of my friends had whole Witcher ruined because of 3 minor bugs. Though I still think it was his fault, it's not so hard just not to think about it at all..
Well, on the other hand, Megaton and Vault 101 are fairly close to each other and I really wouldn't want to see what I saw in Gothic 2 again: Absolutely overcrowded world with a bunch of critters on every step... I mean, it's wasteland, it's supposed to be pretty much empty! It seems to me pretty crowded even the way it is now..
Heh, I sooo don't care about a whole +/- thing :D

you're reading into my comment too much. i never said that we should be "grateful" for working games; however, polish means that the game's mechanics work as they should. an unpolished game would be one that has unexpected results -- i.e., a game and doesn't operate as it should under all conditions. fallout 3 operates as it should. missing item descriptions are not a sign of an unpolished game. if civilization's civopedia had no historically accurate descriptions of research items, but everything else was the same (even descriptions of the effects of different game mechanics), would you call that game unpolished? i think not. i stand by my statement that you are nitpicking.
i made the oblivion comparison because it is common for people who dislike fallout 3 to say that it is oblivion with guns. furthermore, we know that fallout 3 uses a modified version of the oblivion engine. so i was simply stating that bethesda has made significant improvements to the dialogue and voice acting of fallout 3, over that of oblivion. if you see only "yes/yes/I kill you/directions" in the dialogue options, perhaps you aren't looking close enough. that is not what i see -- i have plenty of options to to pull out gossip, information about quests, to manipulate different characters, etc. in rivet city, not to give away too much, i have dialogue choices between several different NPCs to choose freedom over servitude for another character. and if i hadn't asked the right questions, those options wouldn't have even presented themselves.
as far as the pipboy goes -- as i said, i feel you're really nitpicking here. descriptions of the items were never a big part of fallout for me -- the evolving story and iconic images were. how BIS described a 10mm pistol was inconsequential to how the brotherhood of steel was presented. and i think that bethesda did a good job keeping that aspect of the presentation intact. like i said, i don't need a description of a 10mm pistol -- the item name tells me enough.

Valid responses, so a +1. Still say that an attack before Megaton from a weaker creature would have set the world up to be 'dangerous' from the get-go. after the combat inside Vault 101 I expected a least a few bugs or a single weak mugger or something. It just didn't strike me as the 'dangerous wasteland' that get's talked about in the Vault and by everyone! Maybe later on it does, But Bethesda could have done more to show how dangerous the Wasteland was from the vault you just left rather than this 'emptiness'.
After all, Morrowind had that Bandit's cave just outside Seyda Neen you were 'invited' to deal with, and Oblivion had that roadside bandit just passed the Wyre Inn outside of the Imperial City and that Ruin just across from the Sewer exit....!!! :).

All right, we have different opinions about F3. It's late (in Poland at least), so let's just leave it at that :) Have a good night :)

sounds good too me. thanks for the interesting debate!

And thank you. I simply adore discussions on gog.com - polite, thought-out and representing a certain level of manners - quite the contrast from usual Polish boards I visit. Hope to discuss something else with you soon.

Well, you could look at it this way: your character has the same reaction (where's all the danger I was told about?) but if you don't go directly to Megaton, you'll find out. I didn't follow the road as soon as I got out of the vault (I seldom do the expected) and instead thought I'd go check out the collapsed highway overpass. I ran into a critter right away. I figure in a dangerous wasteland, creatures would probably soon learn to stay away from the roads if they're in any kind of regular use at all.
Another angle to look at it: the vault dwellers are told how dangerous the outside world is, but maybe it's deliberately exaggerated in order to keep them in the vault and under control. The scenario somewhat reminds me of Logan's Run and the Overseer certainly has shades of Big Brother.
Just a thought.

That's exactly how it is. No Overseer wants to let people outside the vault. As soon as they do that, they know they've lost control over their piggle-dee-wiggle-dees.
I also didn't follow the road to megaton, I climbed rock faces and jumped off of cliffs to go straight there.