Monday, January 19, 2009

Do not buy Fallout 3

Do not purchase the PC version of Fallout 3. When I first brought it home and started it up, it crashed 3 seconds into the opening movie.
I installed a patch. Same problem.
I installed another patch, I was able to play the game.
Now, however, 5 minutes into the game the keyboard and mouse simply stop responding. The only thing I can do at that point is force quit the game and re-start it....for another 5 min before they stop responding again. I've sent emails to their support network who's auto-responding-bot told me I'd be contacted in 48 hours. That was 4 days ago and I haven't heard a word.

I'm left with a powerless rage I haven't felt since I was 14 years old and my modem stopped working. I really want to play this game, and yet, I can't. All I can do is vent my frustration to you, poor reader. So unless you want to go on a mountain dew fueled killing spree, I'd suggest staying away from anything made by Bethesda Software.

I'm finished now.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm going to wait until they release a Mac version.

In 2026.

Unknown said...

I am also angry at this bug.

What stokes my madness is the home key still works and the mouse dislodges for windows live use. Bad things happen when MS works too hard.

Unknown said...

I may have the fix for this, as I have been having the same issue.



I removed all my codecs (audio and video) and then I installed the Combined Community Codec Pack

http://www.cccp-project.net/


Then, I stopped using my Logitech G9 and G7. I now use my MX510 when playing Fallout 3.

I don't know which step fixed it, but this fixed it for me.

Unknown said...

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/fallout3/show_msgs.php?topic_id=m-1-47077967&pid=918428

.. then suffered from intermittent crashes about every half-hour or so. This was fixed via adding the line "iNumHWThreads=2" to the [General] section of FALLOUT3.ini (in Documents\My Games\Fallout 3). This particular fix is again hardware-specific (it only seems to help people with multi-core CPUs).

Definitely solves constant crashing
on a core i5 (i5m in my case), probably a hyperthreading issue.

Looks like:

Fallout 3.ini ( My Documents folder)

blah blah...
uGridDistantTreeRangeCity=4
uGridDistantCountCity=4
iSaveGameBackupCount=1
bDisplayMissingContentDialogue=1
SSaveGameSafeCellID=2AEEA
bUseThreadedAI=1
iNumHWThreads=2
bChangeTimeMultSlowly=1
bCheckPurgedTextureList=0
bAnimateDoorPhysics=0
sLanguage=ENGLISH
bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=1

[Display]
blah blah...

- "bUseThreadedAI" is also suggested