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Fallout 3 - My GOD these Crashes.

Tchu-Espresso

likes mayo on everthing and can't dance
Fallout 3 might be the most infuriating game ive played in a while. The game crashes on average 1-2 an hour. I can easily Cnt-Alt-Del out of the process, but thats no excuse for it.

I just encountered a particularly infuriating moment in the Big-Town med clinic basement. Upon opening entering the basement, the game autosaved and crashed at the same time. It then proceeded to crash upon loading that same save over and over again until i was forced to revert to an earlier save game state.

What the hell. Its the GOTY edition.

Stock - crashes
NMC texture pack - still crashes
Reinstalling 1.7 patch - still crashes.

This appears to still be a widespread problem with the game and its turned me off the game for a bit to be honest.
 
Is your PC using a quad core processor? If so you can tweak the ini file with the following:

In fallout.ini make the following changes:
bUseThreadedAI=1

and add this line to [General]:
iNumHWThreads=2

In general the game wasn't programmed to support multicore processors, which is why the game ran like shit and was a buggy mess on most modern PCs. However, the ini tweak fixed most of the problems for me.
 
I was fortunate enough to not have any problems with F03 and ended up enjoying my time with it. New Vegas on the other hand was so shamefully broken that I angrily gave up on it and now refuse to buy another Obsidian product.
 
klee123 said:
Is your PC using a quad core processor? If so you can tweak the ini file with the following:

In fallout.ini make the following changes:
bUseThreadedAI=1

and add this line to [General]:
iNumHWThreads=2

In general the game wasn't programmed to support multicore processors, which is why the game ran like shit and was a buggy mess on most modern PCs. However, the ini tweak fixed most of the problems for me.
Yep, its a Core i7-720QM. I read somewhere that altering with that setting sometimes does more harm than good, but i will give it a try!
 
The Black Brad Pitt said:
Yep, its a Core i7-720QM. I read somewhere that altering with that setting sometimes does more harm than good, but i will give it a try!


Yeah, it doesn't hurt to try, but yeah, for me it fixed like 95% of the crashes I initially had.
 
klee123 said:
Is your PC using a quad core processor? If so you can tweak the ini file with the following:

In fallout.ini make the following changes:
bUseThreadedAI=1

and add this line to [General]:
iNumHWThreads=2

In general the game wasn't programmed to support multicore processors, which is why the game ran like shit and was a buggy mess on most modern PCs. However, the ini tweak fixed most of the problems for me.

Yep, this fixed most crashes for me too.
 
klee123 said:
Yeah, it doesn't hurt to try, but yeah, for me it fixed like 95% of the crashes I initially had.
I thought by changing the ini settings that would let me store more textures in my 8GB of RAM (apparently the game severely limits this amount the game uses) would help with the crashing but it didnt really do anything.
 
klee123 said:
Is your PC using a quad core processor? If so you can tweak the ini file with the following:

In fallout.ini make the following changes:
bUseThreadedAI=1

and add this line to [General]:
iNumHWThreads=2

In general the game wasn't programmed to support multicore processors, which is why the game ran like shit and was a buggy mess on most modern PCs. However, the ini tweak fixed most of the problems for me.

Yes, I did something similar to this and it fixed 99% of my crashes... before I did this I couldn't even get out of the vault!
 
Ultrabum said:
Yes, I did something similar to this and it fixed 99% of my crashes... before I did this I couldn't even get out of the vault!
LOL.

Averon said:
Inexcusable to ship out a product like that.
Agreed. I know its a big game, but it seems like a fundamental flaw in quality control there.
 
Averon said:
Inexcusable to ship out a product like that.

Nah, all Bethesda and Obsidian games routinely shipped with thousands of bugs, some of which were show-stoppers like corrupting your saved games. Nothing unusual here.
 
Unknown Soldier said:
Nah, all Bethesda and Obsidian games routinely shipped with thousands of bugs, some of which were show-stoppers like corrupting your saved games. Nothing unusual here.

And it's actually a shame that we allow them to ship games like that.

Luckily, I've never had any serious problem with my PS3 copy of Fallout 3.
 
Unknown Soldier said:
Nah, all Bethesda and Obsidian games routinely shipped with thousands of bugs, some of which were show-stoppers like corrupting your saved games. Nothing unusual here.

If this is a regular occurrence, then that's worse.
 
The Black Brad Pitt said:
I thought by changing the ini settings that would let me store more textures in my 8GB of RAM (apparently the game severely limits this amount the game uses) would help with the crashing but it didnt really do anything.

I think it's limited to 2GB because it's a 32-bit application.
 
SalsaShark said:
120+hours

never crashed
Same here. Over 200 hours in Fallout 3 with zero freezes, crashes, or broken quests. It's actually a Bethesda first for me!

I maybe got lucky.
 
I played all the way through FO3 PC when it came out and had zero crashes (on Vista no less). A few months ago I got the GOTY, with the latest patch it crashed constantly on Windows 7, especially the AI bug where everything freezes but you can still hear music. Limiting the threads in the INI file fixed those crashes, but I still got crash to desktop every few hours. Quite annoying and odd to me since I played the original release on the same hardware with no problems.

I also had problems with FO3 GOTY on Xbox after playing for 20-30 hours. Saves started taking a very long time and the game started freezing (never had problems in the first 20 hours). I gave up on finishing one of the DLC because the freezing got so bad. My nephew had the PS3 version and it was even worse on the crashes and corrupted saves. Just a terrible game from a QA perspective.
 
Stitch said:
and most of the fallout 3 bugs were already in oblivion....
and they were still not fixed in new vegas :lol

Like what? The issue in this thread wasn't in Oblivion and was fixed in New Vegas.
 
Between the frequent stutters, microstutter, and the crashes, Fallout 3 became one of the most painful games to play through in recent years for me.
 
Can't be as bad as the PS3 version.

Normal-Freezed on PSN notifications (SIGNED IN! SIGNED OUT! SIGN IN! SIGN OUT! MESSAGED!) for like two minutes when ANY notification popped up. Patched. Freezed going in and out of VATS randomly.

You'd think they'd fix this with GotY right?

However...!

GOTY: Freezes randomly and often going into VATS. Like Morrowind X-box the bigger your file-size/save for your character (So... ANYTHING YOU DO IN THE GAME causes an increase) the faster your freeze on loading "cells"/new areas or entering/exiting (or hell DURING) VATS freezes.

Fucking annoying, but I got 100% in it and then sold it/returned it and got Just Cause 2. Much better game for all intents.

Even Morrowind GotY/non-GotY wasn't as fucking buggy as Oblivion with Guns PS3 was. >:| At least in Morrowind X-box I could attempt to delete things and make sure to close doors to manage file-sizes to a reasonable level to where I never encountered freezing as bad as OwG3. >:|

Edit: And I hear New Vegas is just as bad, which is a bit of a shame as that at least has the original Fallout team working on it in terms of writing, so I was SOMEWHAT interested in it. :|
 
NBtoaster said:
Like what? The issue in this thread wasn't in Oblivion and was fixed in New Vegas.
meh lot's of stuff. soundrelated crashes, microstutter, lot's of gameplay stuff like missing NPCs and other dumb shit.
 
The PC version also has terrible VAT lag. Sometimes you are waiting up to 10 seconds after entering VATS before you can select a body part to shoot.
 
This kind of shit is what seriously keeps me gaming on consoles.

I just have zero tolerance for patching and editing files and doing research, despite the Master Race status that it might gain me.
 
PortTwo said:
This kind of shit is what seriously keeps me gaming on consoles.

I just have zero tolerance for patching and editing files and doing research, despite the Master Race status that it might gain me.

It wasn't any better on consoles.
 
MisterAnderson said:
I don't think I had any issues with my Fallout 3 on PC strangely enough.

Only issue I had was constant popping/skipping of songs on the radio. Dont remember having any VATS lag.
 
Unknown Soldier said:
Nah, all Bethesda and Obsidian games routinely shipped with thousands of bugs, some of which were show-stoppers like corrupting your saved games. Nothing unusual here.

yeah except reviews only seemed to dock points for the Obsidian New Vegas, Skyrim better be perfectly stable if it gets all 9.8s like most bethesda games.

PortTwo said:
This kind of shit is what seriously keeps me gaming on consoles.

I just have zero tolerance for patching and editing files and doing research, despite the Master Race status that it might gain me.

console games are buggy now also, since they can patch em. You steal our pc games/devs you also get their fleas!
 
I traded in New Vegas (PS3) a week ago because after putting in 30+ hours messing around running side quests and not really progressing with the story.

When I finally decided to progress with the main plot (still hadn't finished part 1 at this point) the game would literally crash every half hour and freeze all the time in certain locations.

Damn shame as I was really enjoying it, but couldn't put up with it's broken nature.
 
I played through the 360 version twice and never encountered any real problems, but since it's a Bethesda game I just consider myself lucky.
 
Wallach said:
It wasn't any better on consoles.
Apart from the occasional freeze (I encountered maybe five freezes or so, and those stopped when I installed the game to my HDD), Fallout 3 ran perfectly on my 360. New Vegas was a lot buggier.
 
Blue Ninja said:
Apart from the occasional freeze (I encountered maybe five freezes or so, and those stopped when I installed the game to my HDD), Fallout 3 ran perfectly on my 360. New Vegas was a lot buggier.

That's about how both games were for me on PC. My point was those experiences were equally split across platforms. Lots of people had experiences with the PS3/360 versions that were basically unplayable. It wasn't an issue of platform.
 
Once they fixed the damn PSN overlay bug, I didn't have many issues with the PS3 version. Though the 2 minute wait going into VATS bug got more and more frequent as time went on.

Though my memory of the game is more poisoned since I suffered through that Alien DLC, what a bunch of boring shit.
 
I had to give up on PS3 Fallout 3 GOTY edition completely because no matter what I did the game ALWAYS frooze up at a certain location. I tried dozens of workarounds but I just could'nt get passed it and got completly stuck. I reinstalled the game and it STILL GOT STUCK at the same point. Not sure if it was a fault on the disc or not.

New Vegas wasn't much better, the game frooze up on me dozens of times and had to do a hard reset every time. But at least I made it to the finish on that one.

Inspite of all this I still love these games...
 
I'm still playing on the 360, about 50 hours with no crashes. Any bugs have been minor AI things and nothing serious.
 
Wallach said:
That's about how both games were for me on PC. My point was those experiences were equally split across platforms. Lots of people had experiences with the PS3/360 versions that were basically unplayable. It wasn't an issue of platform.
You're right. I'm curious what causes it to run fine on one Xbox, but become barely playable on another, though.
 
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