Franchise Original Sin / Fallout

• Fallout 2 is generally very well-loved, but if there's one very vocal complaint about it, it's the excess of pop culture references and humor. The first game had its fair share of this, like being able to randomly encounter the TARDIS or troopers quoting movies on occasion, but these were more Easter Eggs than anything, and they were used fairly sparingly or still made some sense in context. In the second game, they show up a lot more and are much easier to find, which often damages the game's dramatic tone and story — after all, it's a little hard to feel sorry for the plight of a slave when they're blatantly quoting Back to the Future, or take the backstory of an in-game army base seriously when it's got a rogue AI canonically named Skynet. It's not for no reason that New Vegas essentially provided the option to turn many of the pop-culture references off by locking a lot of it behind the "Wild Wasteland" trait. The "Bethouts" not doing this is often seen as a case of not getting the memo.
• One of the more common critiques of Fallout 3's story is that you have no option to join the Enclave and are effectively railroaded into wiping them out. This was true in Fallout 2 as well, but the Enclave in 2 are established as more or less a death cult worshiping the old United States, and they regard everyone other than themselves in the wasteland, the player character included, as degenerates who must be exterminated for the good of humanity. Asking to join them would effectively be asking to immediately die. Even in the original game, joining the mutants simply results in a Non-Standard Game Over. By contrast, the Enclave in 3 are nowhere near as evil, have nowhere near as much reason to hate the PC, and seem to just be another imperialist power among many in the wasteland. They do have a plan that approaches the genocidal nature of their plan in 2, but most of the Enclave is not on board with it, and you can stop it halfway through the game and they'll keep going. Indeed, bafflingly, you can help the most unreasonable factions of the Enclave accomplish that plan, which will kill you, but you can't join the more reasonable factions that only want to control the water supply without irradiating it (which, not for nothing, is the exact same goal that the Brotherhood of Steel, aka the Good Guys, have), making it an even more baffling place to draw the line. Tellingly, both Bethesda and Obsidian would respond to this in future games, allowing you to join every faction, including the ones set up as the most obvious villains of their respective stories - even the Enclave, in 76 - while giving them logical reasons for their villainy rather than a Saturday-morning cartoon motivation of being evil just because they're evil.
• Fallout 4:
  • The protagonist's rather heavy backstory and motivation to rescue their son was widely criticized, with people noting that it constrained roleplay heavily and consumed the plot. But providing the protagonist with some level of backstory and an overarching goal they set out to achieve was the case in every prior Fallout. The difference was that in the prior games, the level of backstory had essentially been "you are a vault dweller/tribe member/courier", and there was enough leeway in dialogue to have your character just not really care about that goal. Fallout 3 is where the issue of a character having a defined backstory began, with the player character having their life before leaving Vault 101 detailed as the tutorial and having a father who they can interact with in the story. However, while the game was pushy about finding your father, the game also allowed you to back off from the main quest without it feeling unnatural since your character had no idea where your father went, and players were still free to roleplay their character as potentially not really wanting to find their dad. Fallout 4 more decisively defines your character's background and their feelings on their missing baby, which disappointed anyone who wanted to roleplay as something besides a concerned parent. Furthermore, because the game pushed your character to find their missing son, it created a major source of disconnect between the player and the character, as it made no sense to do sidequests over finding your son. In 3, your character can ignore finding their dad if they wanted because while they do want to know where he went, their actual initial objective is just to survive, and spending time doing anything other than the main quest can be brushed off as your character figuring their dad can probably take care of himself, with it being possible to have conversations even with people directly related to the main quest without ever bringing up your missing father. A parent searching for their baby who was kidnapped, however, is a far more emotionally urgent task than a legal adult looking for their father who willingly entered the Wasteland, on top of any conversation with anyone related to the main quest practically forcing you to ask if they know about your missing son, making this disconnect harder to ignore.
  • Fallout: New Vegas downplayed the importance of the Karma Meter, with a player's karma only affecting which of three mutually-exclusive perks they can get at level 50, their relationship with one companion out of the eight available, and whether the ending describes them as a prick or not. It was widely seen as a good move, as it helped get away from the many Stupid Evil and Black-and-White Morality moments of 3 (where most of the "evil" options consist of simply killing named NPCs on sight, driving yourself by nothing more than bloodlust and spite), and moved the game in the direction of the more intriguingly grey factions, where the question is less between "good" and "evil" and more between a free but inefficient democracy, a stable but authoritarian dictatorship, or kicking both of them out. When Fallout 4 did away with the karma system entirely, though, it became a real problem, as the developers were no longer obligated to provide "good karma/bad karma" opportunities in the game. Without the need to let the player act out and be a jerk, a lot of other roleplay aspects fell by the wayside, leading to 4's memetically railroaded conversations where your options to someone's requests almost universally boil down to "agree", "make a sarcastic quip the other guy takes as an agreement", or "put it off until you're ready to agree". It didn't help that 4's factions just weren't as popular as New Vegas's, meaning defining oneself by faction loyalty felt like a lost cause.
  • The ending got a universally cold reception for being seen as barebones, but really, pretty much every Fallout game has a pretty barebones ending, usually being little more than a slideshow of still frames and a narrator. The difference was that prior endings tended to treat themselves as a checklist for the player's actions, hence the "slideshow" presentation. 4's ending lacked that checklist, and as a result ended up being two very similar dull-looking cutscenes, with the only choice that made a difference being whether the player joined the Institute or not. It also didn't help that the individual DLCs of New Vegas also had their own slideshows for each one, and these could be pretty intriguingly different depending on the player's actions and alignment, and were pretty much the only "proper" potential evolution that the 20th-century Fallout ending model could go down.
  • The number of quests that amounted to "go there, kill those" or "go there, find this, kill those along the way" were generally lambasted, but every game has had its fair share of them. The difference was that the majority of prior quests tended to let the player resolve them in a variety of ways, while most quests in 4 lacked that flexibility. The addition of randomized and repeatable "radiant quests" that were universally the above two didn't help at all.
  • This video by ItsJabo argues that this is a problem with the early quest "When Freedom Calls", wherein the player acquires a suit of Powered Armor and a minigun to take out several Raiders and a Deathclaw. Even specifically among the 3D Fallouts it's not the first one to give the player A Taste of Power to deal with a much stronger enemy than they're meant to be taking on at the level you're expected to be doing the quest at - Fallout 3 has "Following in His Footsteps", an early-game quest which famously climaxes with the player acquiring a Fat Man mini-nuke launcher to take on a Super Mutant Behemoth. Fallout 3 handled it better for several reasons: the quest takes you quite a ways into the heart of the Capital Wasteland for that setpiece, meaning you invariably have to spend time doing sidequests just to acquire the gear and reach the level where you can reasonably survive the regular encounters in that part of the game, and it evens the odds by giving you a powerful weapon that is highly limited in its uses outside of that setpiece between the cost of keeping it in serviceable condition, the rarity of its ammo, and the fact that it's highly wasteful on anything smaller than another Behemoth, of which there are only four others in the game outside of that quest. In contrast, Fallout 4 puts this setpiece in an area that barely takes ten minutes to reach from where you start the game, meaning you haven't contended with anything more dangerous than a few nearly-harmless bugs and poorly-equipped raiders, and it gives you both power armor and a gun with a thousand bullets in the second-most-common caliber in the game, neither of which are limited in their use beyond the need for fusion cores found in every other building and the second-most-common ammo type in the game, which trivialize everything you deal with from that point, even once you break out of the low-level opening area, unless you make a conscious effort to not use it.
  • On the subject of power armor, Fallout 4 isn't the first one that lets you get a suit of it far earlier than you'd expect, as Fallout 3 again has the "Operation Anchorage" DLC that you can take on almost as soon as you enter the wastes, the end result of which is free power armor training and a nigh-indestructible suit of it. Again, Fallout 3 handled it better: this requires you to buy and play through the DLC in question rather than being in the base game, which still means it's a few hours of gameplay between you leaving the tutorial area and getting power armor, and power armor in 3 is simply less broken on principle than in 4, treated as a regular suit of armor (as in, worn in place of your regular outfit) that just happens to have a minor Strength boost and noticeably higher defense than most other options (the only truly broken aspect of the suit you get for completing the DLC is its sky-high durability, which wasn't even intended), rather than an armored exoskeleton worn over your existing outfit that boosts your Strength much higher, makes you immune to falling damage, and makes you nearly impervious to weapons fire and radiation alike.
• When Fallout 76 came out, it was lambasted almost immediately as the worst Fallout game ever made, with unflattering comparisons to Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (the previous undisputed title holder in the eyes of fans) for its buggy gameplay, lack of story, and mangling of the lore. Many of these flaws can be found going back all the way to the acclaimed first two games.
  • Fallout 76 earned a lot of derision for its complete removal of human NPCs, leaving only Apocalyptic Logs for fleshing out characters. This was heralded in Fallout 3, which offered significantly less dialogue than the prior games, and Fallout 4, which offered even less than that. Thing is, "significantly less than Fallout 2" is still a lot, so it didn't raise as many eyebrows, and there were still a large number of well-written characters to interact with in both 3 and 4.
  • Fallout 3 significantly retooled the gameplay from an isometric turn-based game to a first-person one with a noticeably heavier focus on action. This did get a fair amount of They Changed It, Now It Sucks! complaints, but it was broadly accepted, because the game, simply put, was still an RPG with many potential builds or ways to characterize yourself, albeit one that now drew more from Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls and other contemporary action RPGs. Fallout: New Vegas fleshed out the roleplay aspects even further, bringing them close to the level of the first two games and arguably deepening them with the survival-focused Hardcore mode, proving in the process that there was nothing really wrong with the engine (not to mention, the original Fallout engine had little to brag about). But Fallout 4 reworked the leveling and stat system considerably and refocused the game even further around combat, turning the skills into perks while downplaying the importance of stats, which gutted a lot of the RPG side of the equation. Furthermore, the weaker conversation system killed a lot of the story aspects as well, and without the karma system, there were fewer opportunities for the protagonist to define themselves beyond what the story demanded. When Fallout 76 effectively stripped out the story entirely, the game was left with little more than combat, base-building, and a handful of RPG Elements. Not being able to lean on VATS also made it evident just how lackluster the gunplay in the Bethesda-era Fallout games really was.
  • The early games stuck pretty firmly to their War Is Hell message, but often had trouble maintaining it. While it was possible to get through the whole game without killing anyone personally, you could also blow any character into a pile of Ludicrous Gibs with a large arsenal of weapons. On the other hand, many of the best rewards and endings were found by playing it safe and avoiding direct conflict, the actual combat system wasn't great, and the villains were invariably people who sought out violence as a first resort. But as Actionized Sequel after actionized sequel came out, the focus shifted far more towards "blowing up people for fun and profit", culminating in Fallout 76, where your primary objective is to save humanity by... taking control of and using the same nuclear weapons that killed most of humanity.
  • By a similar count, the first few games dipped themselves in a Raygun Gothic aesthetic that conjured up visions of old-school 1950s Americana and Patriotic Fervor. But they were also a dark and twisted satire of that ideal, and Pre-War America was near-universally treated as hypocritical, violent, imperialistic, and prejudiced. While Pre-War America is still treated as such as the series went on, the patriotic fervor elements of the series became increasingly less satirical. Though there were still attempts made, such as the Mass Fusion subplot in 4, they were counterbalanced by the cartoonishly overblown nationalism and associated imagery being either played straight or treated in such a manner that they might as well have been. Compare the treatment of Frank Horrigan and Liberty Prime, for an example. Both are marvels of old American super-science and in-universe Memetic Badasses with cartoonishly violent personalities that embody the warlike nature of America, but where Frank is still treated dead seriously as the ultimate villain and Final Boss of Fallout 2, Liberty Prime assists the protagonist while spouting propagandistic lines in such a cartoonishly-overblown fashion that it becomes endearing, so much that even though he's technically utilized against the genocidal remnants of the American government in his first appearance, not many people remembered him that way.
  • Fallout 76 was accused of resting on aging gameplay mechanics that had grown uninspired and derivative. The Bethesda-era Fallout games, like all Bethesda titles, are all famous for reusing the same engine (to a lesser extent, this even goes back to Fallout 2, which mostly just tweaked the mechanics of the first game). The problem is that all of the previous well-regarded Fallout games had RPG Elements, the VATS system, interesting NPCs, and well-written quests and stories. All of these were extraordinarily stripped-down or removed from 76, leaving only the things that people complained about for so many years with little of the old charm.
  • Ditto for the bugs, which Bethesda games have always been notorious for - even New Vegas, by an entirely different developer, was infamously broken on release and still has several bugs that are all but guaranteed to happen in a fully-patched game. The thing was, in the past the series' thriving and robust modding community was able to step in and fix broken gameplay mechanics through unofficial patches. Many fans felt that modders saved even Bethesda's buggiest releases, and that mods were necessary to get the best possible experience. Fallout 76, on the other hand, was an online-only game and thus couldn't be modded on top of reintroducing bugs from previous games that had been fixed for several years, meaning that not only could modders not bail out Bethesda this time, but the strain of running an always-online experience created new avenues for Bethesda's programming to go wrong.
  • When Fallout 3 came out, one of the more common gripes from old-school fans was the apparent lack of advancement of the setting—despite the change from the West Coast to the East Coast and the timeline jumping forward by several decades, plenty of things from the old games are present that really shouldn't be there (such as caps, Super Mutants, the Brotherhood, and the Enclave), often having undergone Flanderization in the process, while the Capital Wasteland itself feels far less developed in terms of civilization than the West Coast (such as the prominence of old pre-War buildings that are still covered in rubble, even when they're still in use). This was largely tamped down, though, because 3 was meant to be a reintroduction to the series after ten years where the only releases were semi-obscure spinoffs, and the reaction would likely have been even worse if the first new Fallout game in a decade didn't feel post-apocalyptic and lacked any iconic elements. However, 4, released after the series had reestablished itself for a new generation, was seen as having largely doubled down on these elements to the point of introducing multiple Series Continuity Errors (including several characters who operate clearly-successful businesses out of rubble-covered buildings with skeletons in them that the owner just strangely refuses to remove), and the fanbase proved significantly less forgiving. It didn't help that New Vegas had avoided most of those same problems in the interim (by both being set in a newly war-torn borderland between two emerging post-war nation-entities, also having New Vegas itself set up to serve as a contrast and example of re-emerging civilization, and being a plausible location to put a capstone on some of the lingering plotlines from the Black Isle days), nor that most of Bethesda's new additions to the series lore got at best a lukewarm reception or were seen as largely derivative. When 76 announced that another game would somehow crowbar in the Enclave, Super Mutants, the Brotherhood, and caps, before most of those things should even exist, much less have expanded to West Virginia, the jokes about how Bethesda can't make anything new became a lot less niche.
  • Every game has featured some degree of retconning, continuity errors, or problematic lore. Even the first game has some funky continuity in places (deathclaws are treated as borderline cryptids in the Hub but are common knowledge just a little ways south of there in the Boneyard), but this could be explained away as different settlements not keeping up with one another as much in the earlier years of the post-apocalypse (e.g. the Boneyard knows more about deathclaws than the Hub because only the Boneyard really has problems with them). Later games, though, tended to retcon more important things in dumber ways and for dumber reasons—for instance, 4 accidentally introduced that Jet is a pre-war invention (making the impact of an entire questline and main character of 2 null and void), that ghouls don't need food or water (rendering the entire question of the Necropolis in 1 pointless), and that Enclave power armor is pre-war (meaning the Enclave apparently just sat on their butts for over a century). This relates to the above, as some of the silliest retcons were the result of attempts to add in "iconic" factions. 76's retcon that the Brotherhood somehow managed to fully establish their organization and expand from California to West Virginia in less than thirty years, with the only reason given being a Hand Wave of them having a satellite, was just the point where even fans who hadn't played the old games realized things couldn't add up.
• A more minor example is the series' use of weapons. As visible here, a good portion of the first game's guns, including ballistics, were fictional (at best attributed to real-life manufacturers) and not especially pretty to look at. Being an RPG first and an isometric shooter second, though, this wasn't too distracting because weapons were more tools than key parts of gameplay. The second game also increased the number of realistic weapons, but when the series transitioned to the First-Person Shooter genre with Fallout 3, the player was forced to look at these ugly weapons that made little mechanical sense for much of the game. It wasn't too bad, though, because the fictional firearms were about even in number with ones that were visibly based on real weapons and made more mechanical sense, and New Vegas made up for a lot of it by including several more real-world weapons that looked better and were easier to understand. However, Fallout 4 then doubled down on the problems, with even the purpose-built firearms being nonsensical (even the guns that can be easily understood are near-universally set up for left-handed use despite everyone in the Commonwealth firing their guns from the right hand), and that's on the rare occasion you even see one of them and not the ugly-as-sin, scrap-built "pipe" weapons, which thanks to the expanded gun modification system can be set up in every caliber for every purpose, and as such are used by just about everyone, everywhere. This wasn't helped by a good third of the arsenals in 3 and 4, fictional or otherwise, turning out to be widely disliked or borderline intentionally unusable without many upgrades and the right perks to try and mitigate their problems, so it's no wonder there are hours of content online complaining about the weapons from both a realism and gameplay standpoint and that mods to add real firearms or make in-game ones more realistic are so popular (the game's gunplay is often praised, so long as you download mods to get guns that are nice to look at). The Bethesda arsenals also tend to have somewhat obvious gaps and redundancies (two 10mm pistols in 3, but the one you get first is objectively superior to the other; another pistol that has no reason to be used because it shares ammo with a much more powerful rifle; no .45 semi-autos or pump shotguns in either game; the lever-action rifle in 4 needs unique ammo instead of the 10mm or .44 it could fire in real life; etc.) that can make players long for real guns to do the undone jobs.

---