Fallout Series: Because Arguing Never Changes

Moved from the New Vegas topic, this is for us to pointlessly debate whether FO 1/2's dick is bigger then FO 3's dick.

I think the complaints against FO3 are from people who WANT to hate it and pick apart everything because they feel they have better ideas as to how to make a Fallout game, or something, or they loved Fallout 1/2 so much they're acting like overprotective mothers against Bethesda. Or at least that's how I feel, based on the criticisms offered.

(This might be too much, but I figured if the only reason this thread was made was to contain this, then I might as well over-exaggerate it.)

edited 12th Aug '10 5:45:45 PM by occono

^ Agree'd, even so, I would just say, "think of it as a different game that also takes place in a nuclear wasteland."

Or, they just found some fault with the game that you either ignored or didn't notice. It was the first Bethesda game I played and I was reasonably pleased with it, much more so than I was with Oblivion (which I played after).

It's a fun game. The only thing that puzzles me more than the people who actually do want to hate it just because it's cool to hate games more than the next nerd (they exist, but I have yet to see one on this forum) are the people who pretend it is flawless and any criticisms stem from an irrational unjustified hatred.

Cable: Oh yeah, I agree, Fallout 1 doesn't even feel like it's set in the same world to me. I can understand the feeling of seeing a franchise get malformed into something different you don't want, though.

edited 12th Aug '10 6:03:39 PM by occono

I disagree. Fallout 3 is, in my opinion as someone who STARTED the series with Fallout 3 and ONLY really played Fallout 3, not that great a game. The story feels... Well, it feels wrong.

Somehow, Dad got INTO the Vault. The same vault that has a bunch of dead people outside with signs like "We're dying you [some expletive or another]". No one ever, ever, EVER, even accidentally implies that this man hasn't been here the whole time, or that he's not actually related to anyone else.

And then dad changes him mind all of a sudden, and abandons you to the wolves to run off and save the world. What a great and wonderful guy that everyone worships.

So you follow him, and come to the beautiful city of Megaton. It's a little too brown, but that's a fault all games have lately. Shortly after arriving, you get two requests: Blow up the bomb, or disarm it permanently. Why disarm it? So that the people will be safe for all time. Why blow it up? Uh... well... you see... there's this old guy... with a British accent... in fact he's all the way from Britain... and at one point he said he didn't like the way it looked. Yeah. He didn't like its look.

So will you please blow it up?

Yes? Thanks. It's good to know you don't need any motivation to do hideous things. Drop by Tenpenny Tower sometime. Isn't it cool what great condition it's in, 200 years later? I thought so.

Ignore that ghoul out there. We're prejudiced against them, because we're evil. Not because there's a high risk of them being feral killing machines. It's a lesson on tolerance, dammit. Because if you don't like people who could go crazy and kill you in your sleep, you don't like black people or something.

Speaking of black people, this here is Three Dog. Enjoy your conversations with him. They're not written all that well, and it's kind of railroading, with no real chance of escaping the inevitable. Because what's the point of playing a game if the story can change?

Sooner or later, you'll find your dad and do a bunch of other stuff, and then you'll get to your destiny. It's so destiny-filled that the people who could survive doing it and have no reason to say no will stand idly by. Except Lyons. Apparently it's okay if Lyons gets your destiny, but you'll be a monster for refusing to die, and the game ends anyways. Coolio.

These are just some of the reasons that Fallout 3 is poorly written. Again, I'm not a rabid Fallout fan. I've spent a couple minutes on 1 (quite recently, in fact). I think I started up 2 to see how it looked. But I think it's not that great. Not saying I could do better. Not saying anything about the first two games. Just saying... I think it's flawed.

I'll get back to you all on 1 and 2 and whether or not they're superior when I've played them.

Ah, well,.....who cares about the main quest? I don't. I just see it as a Necessary Evil, and I liked the Tranquility Lane part, and I thought Vault 101 was a good Justified Tutorial.

Also, you can kill Three Dog and just find Dad by yourself :) Or never even meet him... I don't get about how it's Rail Roading.

Can't comment on the ending, I played with Broken Steel installed.

edited 12th Aug '10 6:15:50 PM by occono

If the main story isn't well-written, why should I like it? (EDIT: Though I'm not saying it's 100% bad. Vault 101 wasn't bad on its own, it's just bad in the way it relates to everything else)

By "railroading", I specifically meant, "There's no way to reason with Three Dog except doing what he says". There's no bribery. There's no threatening. No lying. You do his quest, you get a strategy guide, or you explore every nook and cranny and hope you get lucky. Or you have played the game before.

And I think it's entirely fair to criticize the original main quest since they released it to the public.

edited 12th Aug '10 6:22:00 PM by Star_Kindler

Actually, if you pass a speech check you don't have to do that Three Dog Dish Retrieval quest.

edited 12th Aug '10 6:28:26 PM by lightdarkhero250

Really? I have never passed that speech check. I have heard several others make the same complaint, and heard at least one other person state authoritatively that it's not actually passable.

Curse my listening to people who are normally accurate and assuming infalliability.

I wasn't saying you have to like it, I'm just saying I don't care if it sucks, it's not why I love the game :)

And yeah, you can skip his quest with a speech check, I did. Or you could skip him, Rivet City isn't that hard to find just bumbling around the wasteland...Anyway, if you skip his quest and find your dad yourself, you can go back later and get a key to a cache of weapons and ammo hidden in Hamilton's Hideaway as a new incentive to still do it for him.

And of course all the Speech Checks are actually passable! You think the game is just messing with your head?

edited 12th Aug '10 6:40:24 PM by occono

I don't know about yall, but I installed an alternate start mod as soon as I finished the main quest once. Now I never have to deal with that crap again, and can just immerse myself in the wasteland.

IMO: All of the numbered games have been fun. Fallout 1&2 for the amazing writing and openness, and 3 for the incredible gameplay, graphics, and the way it immerses you into its world.

By "railroading", I specifically meant, "There's no way to reason with Three Dog except doing what he says". There's no bribery. There's no threatening. No lying. You do his quest, you get a strategy guide, or you explore every nook and cranny and hope you get lucky. Or you have played the game before.

HAY YOU DO KNOW YOU CAN BYPASS THAT COMPLETELY BY GOING DIRECTLY TO RIVET CITY OR EVEN FIND DADDY YOURSELF OR COMPLETELY IGNORE YOUR MAIN QUEST

edited 12th Aug '10 8:00:48 PM by JackMackerel

I've beaten Fallout 2 and played 3 extensively (love both games) but I can see where the naysayers of 3 are coming from. Parts of the main plot were wonky at best, and wallbangers at worst. That said, I loved 3.

However, after having ebat 2, my new complaint with 3 is the lack of assortment of things you could do in 2. In 2, you can become a prizefighter, a porn star, a slaver (though you can also in 3 making this note a moot point), get shotgun wedding and pimp out one's spouse, (if a female character) sleep with people for favors, the list goes on. Also you can shoot/punch people in the dick; that never ceases to be entertaining.

However both games are awesome IMO.

^ Wait. Back the fuck up. You can do all of that in FO 2? *drools*

Yeah. It's great. Also punching people in the dick with a power armor-ed fist is endlessly entertaining.

Eh, alright, Fallout 2 isn't free on Gametap so I can't argue about that.

However, does Fallout 2 have a gameworld anywhere near as large as the Capitol Wasteland? No? I WIN!

^ Was just about to ask if FO 2 was freeware. It isn't? Damn it...

I've only played the first two games and read an LP of the third one, but I have to agree the scenario and writing is pretty absurd from what I saw. The several railroading bottlenecks in the main quest, the tiny little Thriving Ghost Towns (admittedly unavoidable with a seamless world, but they shouldn't have written the story as though they were self-sustaining communities in that case,) the entire WTF-rifficness that is Megaton, the supermutants and Enclave/BoS being repurposed as trash mooks (doubly strange, since from what I understand, some enemies like the deathclaws and zombie bears are really good Elite Mooks)… The dialog also seemed pervasively ill-written and poorly adapted to SPECIAL's checks and branches.

Regarding the first two though, Fallout 2 was mostly well written and designed, but it was marbled through with thin but frequent veins of annoying stupid garbage. Some of it was honestly ill-thought out like the “vault experiment” thing and V13's overseer being replaced with a computer as a rather mawkish apology for the first game's ending, but a lot of it was just straight-up misguided. The Hubologists, the wedding, the Aliens aliens, the supernatural stuff, and an awful lot of New Reno (the magazine and movie studio especially rankled, JEEZ.) Still, the game is so humongous it's easy to gloss over most of it.

The first game, though threadbare and empty in spots, just feels tightly built and perfectly tied together to me, sort of like a finely crafted clockwork musicbox or something. Every piece sort of fits together nicely.

From what I've read of Van Buren's design docs, it sort of seemed like a combination of the two, using the epic NCR/BoS/etc war as a cohesive backdrop motivating the stories of zillions of locations dotted all over the wasteland. Perhaps by focusing on a single city at the detailed scope of TES, New Vegas will strike a happy medium between the first two games in the exact opposite way?

Speaking of enemies... How about those hillbillies? Most ridiculously overpowered things or what?

By the way Fallout fans, thanks a lot for making us X-COM fans not get taken seriously when we point out the new game is In Name Only.

Yes I'm never gonna shut up about this.

I agree those hillbillies were stupidly overpowered.

I enjoyed Fallout 3, but the game has problems. The writing and voice acting are horrible. The shooting mechanics are stiff and unresponsive, the AI is laughable, the guns are unsatisfying and the level scaling is poorly done - at higher levels, I often found myself running backwards from a scorpion or supermutant unloading clip after clip of my strongest weapons, chipping away at its massive HP pool.

Plus, it's a different genre than Fallout. Fallout was a CRPG, Fallout 3 is an action-adventure sandbox game.

That sounds harsh, but I enjoyed it for what it was. It's a lot of fun to just roam around the wasteland scavenging for gear and guns and getting into adventures.

The issue isn't whether Fallout 3 is In Name Only—it's a freaking genre change! The issue is whether what it became is bad in and of itself. Same deal for XCOM.

I played Fallout 3 on Hard and I never, ever had a problem with Swampfolk.

Might have something to do with the fact my character's crazy accurate with critical-strike increases like Armitage's Plasma Rifle.

Railroading doesn't bother me as much as the fact that most of the entire second half of the game is a bloodbath. Once the enclave shows up, you'd better have a small/heavy weapon skill because stealth is nonfunctional and diplomacy is not an option.

The game is definitely Fallout, it's just Fallout after the developers have been sniffing paint.

Sabre Justice: You're welcome. Anyone who is stupid enough not to see they have nothing in common is not someone who you should be wasting your time talking with.

edited 12th Aug '10 9:02:34 PM by Mammalsauce