why do so many people think Fallout is Borderlands?
because it is outside of 1, NV, and tactics.
fallout 2 had a lot of silly shit in it and arguably started the trend and the "theme park" mentality of the franchise the last 20 years outside of one game all says its borderlands. Plus "comedy" is rather easy, look how many failed stand ups are amazing podcasters, if you can manage one joke in an hour than you are considered hilarious.
They never played the OG titles.
if you said 6 million people have played even one isometric game i'd say you're full of shit. even if Fallout 2 is the king of the genre, its still probably bullshit to say even a quarter million people played it back before Bethesda owned the IP
Second, the station was very tiny.
you sure from what i heard it was on par with the oil platform in 2 in terms of size and by your own words, for it to have sidequests and a robot and multiple floors. this space station had to be pretty fucking big (at least bigger than say Vault 15)
and certainly no Frank Horrigan clones
surprised more people don't whine about Frank, he literally makes any non-combat spec character completely fucked. imagine if Bethesda tried that.
Therefore it just felt narratively "natural" Dean kicks the bucket because he just couldnt help himself as to not be in control.
technically if you consider the tv show canon, Dean was right about everything when it came to the creator of the Sierra Madre. pre-show, he was just an insane narcissist who purposely tried to fuck over that guy because he's a thin skinned petty asshole and its also why he took Vera away from the dude. But the tv show paints the guy in the right (probably completely by accident) by showing the creator to be as much of an evil shithead as Dean said, whereas he's originally supposed to be a goodhearted rich guy a la Walt Disney and its why Dean's sabotaging of everything is supposed to be so vile. If you bother reading about all the things that lead to the downfall of the casino (there's an in-game achievement for it) Dean is basically the Iago of the backstory and is responsible for everything from the way the ghost people happen to how the holograms are programed to the need to reroute power to cause the casino to open.
But if you assume the tv show is canon, than Dean's just an asshole who keeps accusing a guy of things he knows for a fact is true and despite his nature is ultimately in the right, plus if he survives he helps in the final fight with elijah and lets you steal all the shit in the vault so he's not completely an asshole. Basically depending on if you take the tv show as cannon Dean is either the video game version of Maddox or Maddax.
my head canon always was that the leveling up in skills is just the courier getting back to his "pre-shot in head" awesomeness. like how if you wake up out of a coma you literally need to relearn how to walk or even talk, but eventually you'll end up back near 100%; the fact that a badass like Ulysses is a co-worker of the courier and presumably was not shot in the head, but clearly wasn't training before you meet him in lonesome road proves just the level of badass you need o be a courier.
The person who wrote the story for the TV series was a fallout fan back in college. He had only played fallout 1 & 2,
thats literally a lie, whomever told you that should be shot in the head and left for dead right next to goodsprings. SoCal in Fallout 2 was way more civilized to the point they paid with actual dollars for everything and considered bottle caps to be primitive and the population was nearing a million then you have guys like Merton who were 90s level social outcasts which should tell you how modern a lot of the wasteland had gotten by then.
in typical Fallout 1 and 2 fashion, the game doesn't tell you that (another gripe I have with the early games)
thats one of the worst parts about 90s games in general and is one of the reasons that its absurd when old fans whine about dumbing shit down. so much was about bullshit trial and error that you wouldn't need and they wouldn't bother with in modern games because you could literally just look them up.
