Ben Paddon!

So funny story.

A friend of mine came over this weekend…he had Fallout 3 for the XBox and said it was great and I need to buy it immediately. We looked up the system requirements online but didn’t see my graphics card listed.

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “The computer is brand new.”

So, stupidly, I paid for and downloaded the game. The launcher worked. The menus worked. The game, whenever I actually tried to start it, crashed.

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Since it was a Steam purchase it was tethered to my account, and, unlike a physical CD in a box, I couldn’t just give it to someone as a gift or sell it on ebay.

So I wrote to Steam to explain the situation. Which was, basically, the fact that I’m a total moron who didn’t make absolutely sure the game would play before he bought it.

And believe it or not, they refunded my money.

They did also provide a stern assurance that they could not make a habit of refunds. That is more than fair. And, in fact, I didn’t expect a refund at all…I just figured it couldn’t do any harm to ask.

So I got my money back, and gained a really huge respect for Steam, who didn’t have to do this.

Now I see that there is a community online trying to create a mod so that Fallout 3 will work on my particular graphics card. If they succeed I’ll download it again. Until then, I wish I could play. :-(

Here’s the Mod project…a few threads are going about it but it’ll give you an idea of what’s happening. The most progress they’ve made is that they manage to play the game for a few minutes without it crashing, but none of the characters have heads.

http://www.oldblivion.com/sm/index.php?topic=5828.0

I’m holding out hope for the mod. I’d gladly download Fallout again if I could confirm that it will actually work on my card.

Here are my results from systemrequirements.com, which I should have checked first:

Video Card
Minimum: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 256MB RAM (NVIDIA 6800 or better/ATI X850 or better)
You Have: Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family (Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family)
FAIL: Sorry, your video card does not meet this minimum requirement.
Video Card Features – Minimum attributes of your Video Card

Video RAM: Required – 256 MB , You have – 448 MB
Video Card 3D Acceleration: Required – Yes , You have – Yes
Video HW Transform & Lighting: Required – Yes , You have – Yes
Vertex Shader Ver.: Required – 2.0 , You have – 3.0
Pixel Shader Ver.: Required – 2.0 , You have – 3.0

So basically my card can handle each individual component that the game needs, and then some, but just isn’t specifically supported. Ass!

Maybe. Evidently my computer can’t run Oblivion either…at least not without the “Oldblivion” mod, which adds support for my graphics card. (That’s how I found the Fallout project. It’s amazing how much research you’ll do when you believe you’ve cheated yourself out of $50.) I have no idea how long that took them to put together, though…

One of the posts in the Fallout project says we could have a workable mod by the end of the week. That seems OBSCENELY optimistic. Even if it does happen, I’ll give it a few weeks for them to iron out the bugs before I decide to buy the game again.