Fallout Series: Because Arguing Never Changes

It is true that Fallout and XCOM, in and of themselves, have nothing in common. However, a common complaint about Fallout 3 (the change in genre) is also a common complaint about the new XCOM, and because the new XCOM isn't out yet, and we hardly know anything about it, there aren't any other informed complaints that can be made about it yet.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Not xcom and fallout, I meant new xcom and old xcom. Not even xcom fans give a damn about the 'lore' of the series so to speak. Fallout is all about the world and setting. That's the difference. New xcom is in name only, fallout 3 is just a change in genre.

X-Com & XCom.

Eric,

Railroading an issue in Fallout 3? Hum. I didn't really have problems with that. There's certainly a lack of branching, but you could make that point about Fallout 1 too, where if you decide to ally with the muties you basically get a glorified alternative game over screen.

That said, the writing was pretty bad. I'm not talking about logical inconsistencies in the setting, I've never cared that much for that in Fallout, but the writing was really confused, there wasn't really any proper foreshadowing, and a lot of story elements were thrown in just to connect the game with the older Fallouts (why the Super Mutants, Beth, why?).

They captured the spirit of Fallout's quests and the visuals of the setting though (IMHO of course, there's always someone who's going to argue with that) so that's more than enough for me.

That, that right there? That's good by computer game standards. If you've got branches leading off from nearly every choice, even lopped off stumps, it brings you one step further from But Thou Must!. Certainly much better that being plugged with a cutscene pistol round through the head for your troubles.

Eric,

Eh, I know, and I know they didn't have a super-great budget for Fallout but still.. little old me wanted a little section where I could cripple Vault 13's inhabitants with a minigun as a super duper mutant.

It's not just a genre change, Bethesda borked up the setting as well. Watching them try to emulate Fallout's black humour was like watching a quadrouple amputee try to dance the bolero.

Actually, now that I remember, you could convince Three Dog to give you the info you need about your dad by promising to help him with the radio thing later. If your persuade skill is high enough, he will agree.

Changing the subject a little bit, anyone here has played Tactics? I've heard there are quite a lot of little references in Fallout 3, but I didn't spot most of them only having read the summaries on the Fallout wikia.

I enjoyed FO 3 for what it was. The writing never bothered me though, but then again I don't remember much of it.

What I would like to see changed is how incredibly limited the "conversation modes" are. You can only talk to one person at a time, time freezes, the character you are talking to has limited animation and expressions, so when they try to express emotions it becomes a bunch of Narm.

Also, even considering the setting and science, the idea of the world looking exactly the same TWO HUNDRED YEARS after a nuclear apocalypse can be pretty hard on the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

Again, still enjoyed it. But I have not played the first 2 games - the only games I have as a point of reference are either Mass Effect or Deus Ex.

Actually, now that I remember, you could convince Three Dog to give you the info you need about your dad by promising to help him with the radio thing later. If your persuade skill is high enough, he will agree.

You get a bonus if you do it later, a key to a weapons stash.

Dumbo

^^^ I remember there being references to stuff from Tactics from logs on computers in the Brotherhood of Steel base, but I don't know that I remember any other mention.

In any case, Fallout 3 is a decent enough game, but it just didn't engage me like the first two did. Some of the problems are just common to most first person type RPGs, with people and places tending to sort of all look the same, etc. But also, yes, the storytelling wasn't as good. I never felt like it was tied together very well, either. If you followed the main quest, you could miss a significant portion of the game, because a lot of the side quests weren't hinted along your path. In the first two, more of the side quests and locations were things that you ran into as part of your main quest, and could choose to get involved or not. In the third, you had to decide to just wander off into the wasteland looking for trouble to find a lot of the content. Which seems to make little sense in the context of the game.

I felt like the major flaw, though, was that it felt like it was trying so hard to be like the other Fallouts that it strained my Willing Suspension of Disbelief. As was mentioned, the fact that it's supposed to be two centuries after the war doesn't seem to fit with how everything looks. Even in Fallout 2, which was about 160 years afterwards, its clear that people are already rebuilding and moving, but the Fallout 3 ruins look awfully fresh. It feels like the game keeps trying to remind you what the setting is, as if you couldn't tell. Characters keep bringing up things about the nuclear wasteland, as if they hadn't lived in it their entire life, characters talk like they remember before the war, even though it was before their great grandparents time. And of course the whole plot seems to be a patchwork of the plots from the first two games. What with you being a vault dweller, there being a big water purification issue, the enclave trying to do the same damn thing as last time. It felt like they brought a lot of stuff in just to try to be like the previous games.

Of course, I can't completely blame them for that. If they'd try to be more original, a portion of the fanbase still would've hated it. And juding by some of the stuff they did invent, like the Fatman and the Rock-It-Launcher, maybe it's for the best (though I did love the Railway Rifle).

Again though, I did enjoy it, even if not to the level of the originals. Its made by different people, and the genre isn't the same; it's basically an adaptation, with all the problems that come with that. The originals were far back enough that the die hard fans have their nostalgia goggles firmly entrenched in their skulls, so I'm not that surprised that they nitpick over minor details and get way more worked up over than they should. Unfortunate, but not surprising. It has its problems, but it has its good points, too.

Now, what I want to know, is why there keeps being discussions about this on this forum, and why I keep finding myself posting in them.

In the third, you had to decide to just wander off into the wasteland looking for trouble to find a lot of the content.

I loved that aspect myself, that's what makes the game for me :)

Dumbo

It sort of breaks immersion for me, with the context of the story. If you were out looking for your father, would you decide to just go wandering around looking for trouble?

It might have seemed less silly to me if there were at least more interesting things going on out there. After a certain point, a lot of it got a little samey. It also got to the point that scavenging become unsatsifying, once I had all the money and bullets I was going to ever need. The story and world didn't quite motivate me most of the time.

Different things work for different people, I suppose.

^ Well, considering who that father was, my answer is a resounding YES!

I enjoyed Fallout 3 immensely, but it was not for the writing, graphics, or gameplay. It was being a kind of superhero in the waselands. Just wandering around, talking to anybody I who needed help, and fulfilling the tasks that they gave me. Whether it was looking for scrap metal to fix Megaton, to helping slaves free themselves from slavers. I could snipe a guy a hundred feet away with a Chinese rifle, and talk my way out of almost any problem. Every time I played I was doing a true role-play, and every time it was like reading a kind of comic that tried to place Jonah Hex in a post apocalyptic wasteland (again).

I conquered corrupt organizations, talked to vampires and lived, defeat a super-villian, channeled the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, save a town from a nuclear bomb, snuck into a Chinese base in Alaska and destroyed a tank on foot, fought for freedom as a gladiator, even stop an alien invasion of earth with a real cowboy.

It was not rescuing my father, or stopping the enclave that were my greatest moments in game, but rather all of the moments I listed above.

I'll admit Fallout 3 had flaws, but damn it, I loved it.

"...Ah! Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" -Wash

^ That is pretty much exactly how I felt about the game as well. The main quest was almost incidental to my play experience, and I found that I could get a lot of mileage out of playing certain characters certain ways.

That's not to say that the game didn't have problems, or even big ones. But despite the problems, it was still a game that I thought was worth putting in 200+ hours into, which is exceedingly rare these days.

edited 16th Aug '10 12:08:10 PM by Meeble

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Fallout 3 is a good game, no doubt about it. Same thing for Fallout 1. But Fallout 2... I just couldn't get into, for a couple of reasons:

1) The tutorial. F1 simply threw you into the action, but it was simple, so it worked. F3 gradually built up your knowledge by chronicling your younger days, and was wonderfully immersive. F2... has you crawling through a temple with a spear, fighting Radscorpions, Save Scumming to get through without either dying of poison or shooting your Perception to hell, and stuck with a crappy spear. Not only that, you have to fight a guy at the end, bare handed, and you die if you lose. Much like with Arcanum, my dreams of playing a RPG as a gunslinger were smashed against the rocks, as I had to take melee skills in order to get past what is SUPPOSED TO BE THE EASIEST PART OF ANY GAME.

2) There's really no plot. You get a vague objective, and then are thrown out to wander around, die, reload, wander, die, reload, etc. I spent the entire game just randomly searching the wasteland for something, ANYTHING to advance my quest. The story only picks up momentum at the very end, and even then, it's little more than a "The US Government is EVUL!" cliche. And yes, having the little epilogues for each town was awesome, and I hated how they took them out of F3, but that doesn't excuse the absence of a central narrative for most of the story.

3) I loved the sheer number of things you could do... if your game didn't keep crashing and glitching up. I first played the game without any of the fan patches, and dear lord, it was a mess. The problem goes right around to having so many different choices. None of them matter in the long scheme of things, very few are ever brought up again, and your only real reason for doing them is to get money, gear and experience. And then there was that time I did something, and the game suddenly became Unwinnable. And then the time after that.

Fallout 2 isn't a bad game, but I just couldn't get into it like others apparently can.

I actually really liked point #2. There's sort of a thread of misdirection and vague rumors in each town, leading me on a wild goose chase (Arroyo→Klamath→Den→Modoc/Redding→Vault City/Gecko→New Reno→Broken Hills→NCR→V13→Arroyo) clockwise around the entire map. It felt kind of like a Walking the Earth TV show's plot, with the MacGuffin always seemingly just one step ahead.

I actually found the first game more random in this regard, since there's absolutely no indication Necropolis is special.

Eric,

You can talk your way past the guy in the Temple of Trials in FO 2, but it's not even a difficult fight. You can easily get past him without any hand-to-hand fighting skill.

It's not a difficult fight, but it takes forever on Hard if you don't have Unarmed skill. Still, I think Fallout 2 is my favorite game in the series overall.

Edit: And I usually tag Speech anyway.

edited 17th Aug '10 9:05:38 PM by LullTheConqueror

the dice are loaded, the deck is stacked, the game itself will hold you back

I love how much stuff there is to do in Fallout 2. And then you add one of the big patches that adds everything they intended to do, and it's a near-endless game.

Popes for the Pope's throne!

For all the crap I give Fallout 3 for being the ugly inbred incest-child of Bethesda and their horrible Oblivion engine it was the most fun I ever had with a Fallout game, even though by all rights it shouldn't have existed and the people responsible should of been deported to Siberia.

edited 17th Aug '10 9:08:20 PM by Pipman

It's not a difficult fight, but it takes forever on Hard if you don't have Unarmed skill. Still, I think Fallout 2 is my favorite game in the series overall.

It takes forever even with an unarmed-oriented character.

Also, why does talking to people in Gecko take fucking forever Goddammit

And is there a way to tell more than one of your squad to stay put at the same time?

Half-Life: Dual Nature, a crossover story of reasonably sized proportions.

I'm curious; What is it about them that angers you so?

Anyway, I personally prefer the third game over the originals. I know I probably pissed off quite a few people saying that, but I really didn't find the first game (the only one of the older games that I've played) that interesting. Maybe the writing was better, but the game was merely okay to me.

• From what I heard in the game, there's no music that would suit a battle. Whenever you initiate combat, the same atmospheric music would play, instead of switching to something more appropriate. Not saying the music is bad, but a battle theme would've been nice.
• The graphics haven't aged well. Sure, the "Talking Heads" and cutscenes look alright, but something about the sprites bug me, and I can't tell why. I'm curious if there's a mod that improves them...
• It was a pain trying to buy stuff en masse, or buying one expensive item. There's 999 caps in a stack (though I heard there's a mod that has it go to 9,999), when some items cost thousands.
• I found a lot of the skills useless. Why would I need First Aid and Doctor when I have a steady supply of Stimpacks, and I never seem to get crippled? I never saw much need for Repair, besides the one part in The Glow, IIRC. I found using the Small Guns and Energy Weapons skills were the way to go when it came to combat.
  • Speaking of skills, something about Speech annoyed me. Yes, it's useful for persuading others, but you have no idea when it's used, since there's no indicating which dialogue option would apply it (from what I recall). You could argue that it would ruin figuring out which options Speech is used in, but I don't like it. If I remember, it would highlight which options used Intelligence with [Intelligence], so why not highlight [Speech], like in 3?
• Difficulty options made no sense. All it seemed to do is lower your Skill % when you turn up the difficulty. I don't think it makes the enemies smarter or hit harder or anything else, and I don't know why.
• I don't think the shopkeepers restock items. If they do, it's not for, like, a week or more. I could wait, but when you're on a time limit, you tend to not take your time. This isn't a big deal, since you don't need that much, and the only items that I found were important to buy were drugs  ^*
  ^{particularly, whichever one lowered your Intelligence, so you could get infinite Stimpacks at Vault 13}
  , Stimpacks, weapons, and ammo.
• The Level cap is a weird number. Seriously, 21? The only reason I could think of to have that as the cap is so you can have one more Perk, since you get one every third level.

Troper page Nothing interesting here, move along...

FO 3 was an FPS. That's the first blow. I LIKE tactical games. I like strategy. I can torture myself throuh an FPS if the story is good, but everything else being equal I'll take the isometric turn-based or real-time-with-paue option any time.

The second blow: The writing. It's just not as good. That's not to say the writing is BAD per se, but it feels kind of dull and lifeless, and the characters aren't particularly memorable.

Three: Finding stuff. It's too much work trying to find stuff in the wasteland. The earlier fallouts had enough pixel hunting, but this game took it to extremes. That made it very Not Fun for me.

"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy Ent