Fallout series

[vertexwindi]

And also decapitated human torsos hanging from ceilings in raider lairs.

Eh, both got raiders. I honestly don't remember most of the FO3 raiders cause they're kinda generic.

 

[Don Yagon]

I honestly don't remember most of the FO3 raiders cause they're kinda generic.

Same applies for NV, except named fiends. And there are also raiders in The Pitt.

Speaking of mods, there is an ongoing project from Russians trying to replicate Fallout 2 on NV engine, called The Chosen's Way. It's a very slow process, but they are still working on it from as early as 2011, and doing reports on their work much more frequenly than F4NV. Dunno if it was mentioned in this thread or not.

 

[GethN7]

And also decapitated human torsos hanging from ceilings in raider lairs.

Never understood why they decided to do a whole new voice acting. I know that Bethesda sent some lawsuit preventing the usage of voice assets, but surely it can be circumvented by forcing players to use an external patcher which extracts voice lines from a completely legit copy of New Vegas and then packs them for usage in mod. Tale of Two Wastelands did something like that.

Quality concerns.

While not noticeable under the original engine, under a new engine with better sound fidelity the old audio would sound terrible, and there is only so much you can do to clean it up before you just have to say "screw it" and re-record new audio. Even TTW has to do some cleanup of the original FO3 audio so it mostly matches the slightly better FNV audio in quality when the patcher runs.

 

[Dom Cruise]

The game is cheesy revisionist fan fiction under the very superficial associative context of Fallout, like an appendix of parallel nothingness with the central plot being ruminated on after much more interesting, smaller bits and pieces were laid out. The only really "good" bits of lore from Fallout 3 are the Keller Family Holotapes and... Yeah that's about it.

It's best just to pretend Bethesda's Fallout is it's own separate continuity to be honest.

Their take on the franchise isn't worthless, they played up the 1950s angle more, which is cool, but when you try to actually connect the Bethesda games with 1, 2 and NV there's a lot of clashing, it just doesn't feel like it's the same exact world at all.

They did at least explain how the Brotherhood of Steel got to the east coast with the airship in Fallout 4 though (although I also believe they got that idea from Fallout Tactics)

People give Bethesda a lot of shit but if you want to see a really bad Fallout game check out Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel on the PS2 and Xbox, I tried that once and didn't even make it 15 minutes before I shut it off, Bethesda's version is perfectly acceptable compared to that game.

 

[John Titor]

Anyone here feel Dead Money gets a little too much hate? Just curious.

I like the diretion but if there's a negative, it's that you can't go back to the game proper until you finish it.

View attachment 1309247

Get back to work, Todd.

And also decapitated human torsos hanging from ceilings in raider lairs.

Never understood why they decided to do a whole new voice acting. I know that Bethesda sent some lawsuit preventing the usage of voice assets, but surely it can be circumvented by forcing players to use an external patcher which extracts voice lines from a completely legit copy of New Vegas and then packs them for usage in mod. Tale of Two Wastelands did something like that.

I don't know how anal Bethesda is about this kind of stuff but apparently it's discouraged to reuse assets in modding circles. There was some incident where someone was banned on Nexus for using Oblivion assets in Skyrim. I'm not too clear on it tbh.

 

[God of Nothing]

Anyone here feel Dead Money gets a little too much hate? Just curious.

Eh, I think people give it too much of a pass. It railroads you into getting captured by Elijah and into being his bitch for most of the entire thing. Like, you can have Explosives maxed out but you can't disable a basic bitch pre-war explosive collar that is set off by stray radio signals of all things. You're shown capable of disarming explosive collars if you decide to free the slave family from Cottonwood Cove.

Also, you can hack shit wirelessly with RobCo appliances like the pip-boy but only Elijah can do it because he so genius, being addicted to mentats and insane. The theme of the DLC is forced shit and gold bars don't weigh 35 pounds or come in at 10 oz.

 

[Mola Ram]

Like, you can have Explosives maxed out but you can't disable a basic bitch pre-war explosive collar that is set off by stray radio signals of all things. You're shown capable of disarming explosive collars if you decide to free the slave family from Cottonwood Cove.

You have the same dilemma if you go to the Hidden Valley bunker for the first time without Veronica. They strap a bomb collar to you and force you to do a bunch of gruntwork before they trust you enough to let you in (incidentally, this is why I always kill the Brotherhood in NV; fuck those control freaks). Presumably you can't disarm a bomb collar you can't see, even with 100 Explosives.

 

[byuu]

View attachment 1309247

FO3 has low int dialogue too. The problem is that's all it has.

 

[God of Nothing]

You have the same dilemma if you go to the Hidden Valley bunker for the first time without Veronica. They strap a bomb collar to you and force you to do a bunch of gruntwork before they trust you enough to let you in (incidentally, this is why I always kill the Brotherhood in NV; fuck those control freaks). Presumably you can't disarm a bomb collar you can't see, even with 100 Explosives.

Yeah, that is also complete bullshit and the reason why I always toast them too, bunch of fucking toaster-worshiping tin cans. NCR should've finished the job. If not them, at least the Legion would kill every last one of them on sight.

My own reservations toward NV as a fallout game (and as a standalone game) is that, while it's a quite competent story, with an acceptable albeit dated game-play and a map design (that was understandably limited by the crippling Creation Engine,) I just found its ambience to be lackluster and the narrative to be all too self-indulgent.

It essentially feels like a first-person CiV game dealing with post-post-apocalyptic groups battling over as to whom gets a larger share out of a world which has arisen from its ashes. So, as a result, you have a lot of content hinging on character and faction relations, with little to no quests that are completely divorced from the main plot, which is the House/Legion/NCR/Yes-Man standoff. Everything and Everyone are involved, either directly or indirectly, in this conflict: You pick up Arcade Gannon, and what-do-ya-know, he's related to the remnants of the Enclave, whom coincidentally are all in Nevada and willingly help you trample over whatever faction you are fighting at Hoover Dam. You randomly go to the Boomers? Oh they'll gladly befriend you should you survive their evisceration, and lend you a military bomber aircraft to carpet all resistance at Hoover Dam! The examples are endless. It's well structured, but it feels fucking mechanical and redundant, because the magic of exploration and variety is sacrificed in exchange for partaking in what is basically a political soap opera. Because nothing exists in of itself, but everything has to serve or relate to the main conflict.

What this means in practice is there's no real impetus to go and explore the environment. This is actually intentional, because your starting position is such that ya either follow a very narrow path that accommodates your leveling up (so it's intuitive,) or you go west and get mauled by creatures way out of your league. By the time you're at Vegas and have dealt with Benny, it's not unlikely that most of NV's uncharted territories get marked on the map and their nature or function is disclosed by a third party. They turn into redundant fetch quests for people that, again, must somehow tie into the faction war. At the end of the day - in this very plot-driven game - you're forced to answer this very simple but important question: "Do ya find the main story compelling?" If the answer is "Yes", then NV's game design is vindicated! If you're more like me and the answer is "No", then the entire game quickly falls apart like a house of cards. For all of its dialogue and plot choices, New Vegas is, at its core, a one-trick pony. It's a lineal story that disregards all the innovations brought by Bethesda (open-world, cool aesthetics...) and just built on what it lacked (a story, non-dumb dialogue etc.)

It's actually quite hysterical that a franchise with so much potential in both story and game-play has never, to date, produced a game that harmonizes both elements and doesn't elevate one to the detriment of the other. And it's downright sad that the prospects for such seem to be dwindling, especially after the miscarriage that was 76.

One thing I hated was how even Marcus, someone who isn't stated to have gone further east and served in an autocratic genocidal army, had something bad to say about the Legion. Like, how the fuck does he even know anything about them? He's been in the mountains for fuck knows how long now building towns that constantly fail because mutants suck. Where the fuck is the one person who doesn't know what's going on in the grander scheme of things and doesn't give a shit because they have their own issues?

Too much revolved around the Dam and the factions vying for it. Considering how shafted everything else was just to pad out the NCR, it's not surprising. Goodsprings, Novac, and Prim had their own things going on but every other location had to involve or bring up all the big assholes scheming in the desert. Made the world feel way smaller than it was.

 

[CWCissey]

On that note, how the fuck is this thread not full of Ulysses memes? That guy is a wellspring of autism even by ol’ Bethesda’s standards.

*Gargles gravel* We know our his-toreeeee.

 

[vertexwindi]

The bear and the bull. The bear and the bull. The bear and the bull. The bear and the bull.

Granted, I will admit that New Vegas falls kind of apart the second you get to the main quest in Vegas proper. The fetch quests are rather uninspired even though the factions you recruit are pretty interesting.

 

[God of Nothing]

Marcus didn’t even change a bit from his depiction in Fallout 2. His presence reeked of fan-service for the No Mutants Allowed puritans.

As for neutral parties, I think the most glaring irony is that the most important character for the Courier; Dr. Mitchell, (whom brings a Jesus back from the dead and starts the plot) is apathetic to all of the drama unfolding in Nevada, gaining no notoriety for saving the Courier’s ass.

On that note, how the fuck is this thread not full of Ulysses memes? That guy is a wellspring of autism even by ol’ Bethesda’s standards.

Yeah. For all the complaints leveled at 3 for including the Enclave, supermutants, and BoS, New Vegas includes all three with little reason as to their presence other than proximity to California. Fucking hilarious how Marcus has already failed two different times to establish a mutant settlement

Since we're talking about Ulysses:
>"You destroyed a nation that could've rivaled the BEAR and the BULL!"
>The Divide got BEARED in a single day
>"You don't think, you cause destruction wherever your road goes."
>"Why yes, I did arm the White Legs that destroyed New Canaan, directed Elijah to a pre-war technological treasure trove that could destroy the world, and got nuclear launch codes from Big MT to destroy the Mojave. Did I mention I told Caesar about Hoover Dam and New Vegas too? Why so angry, Courier?"

 

[Mola Ram]

Since we're talking about Ulysses:

Has it ever been posited that the settlement in the Divide that Ulysses is so pissed about never actually existed? We see no evidence of it outside his ramblings, our Courier seems to have no memory of it whatsoever, and -- weirdest of all -- there's an entire achievement (Nostalgia) devoted to finding all the scraps of the Divide's history, and not one of them relates to this supposed settlement. They're all either NCR troops exploring the land or pre-War documents.

Ulysses certainly comes across as crazy enough to have dreamed up a purely imaginary community and blame you for its nonexistence.

 

[God of Nothing]

Has it ever been posited that the settlement in the Divide that Ulysses is so pissed about never actually existed? We see no evidence of it outside his ramblings, our Courier seems to have no memory of it whatsoever, and -- weirdest of all -- there's an entire achievement (Nostalgia) devoted to finding all the scraps of the Divide's history, and not one of them relates to this supposed settlement. They're all either NCR troops exploring the land or pre-War documents.

Ulysses certainly comes across as crazy enough to have dreamed up a purely imaginary community and blame you for its nonexistence.

The entire backstory of Lonesome road is a tribal having a schizophrenic episode... Makes sense.

 

[Get_your_kicks_with_30-06]

My own reservations toward NV as a fallout game (and as a standalone game) is that, while it's a quite competent story with an acceptable but dated game-play and map design (which were understandably limited by the crippling Creation Engine,) I just found its ambience to be lackluster and the narrative to be all too self-indulgent.

It essentially feels like a first-person CiV game dealing with post-post-apocalyptic groups battling over as to whom gets a larger share out of a world which has arisen from the ashes. So, as a result, you have a lot of content hinging on character and faction relations, with little to no quests that are completely divorced from the main plot, which is the House/Legion/NCR/Yes-Man standoff. Everything and Everyone are involved, either directly or indirectly, in this conflict: You pick up Arcade Gannon, and what-do-ya-know, he's related to the remnants of the Enclave, whom coincidentally are all in Nevada and willingly help you trample over whatever faction you are fighting at Hoover Dam. You randomly go to the Boomers? Oh they'll gladly befriend you should you survive their evisceration, and lend you a military bomber aircraft to carpet-bomb all resistance at Hoover Dam! The examples are endless. It's well structured, but it feels fucking mechanical and redundant, because the magic of exploration and variety is sacrificed in exchange for partaking in what is basically a political soap opera. Nothing exists in of itself, but everything has to serve or relate to the main conflict.

What this means in practice is that there's no real impetus to go and explore the environment. This is actually intentional, because your starting position is such that you either follow a very narrow path that accommodates your leveling up (so it's intuitive,) or you go west and likely get mauled by creatures way out of your league. By the time you're at Vegas and have dealt with Benny, it's not unlikely that most of NV's uncharted territories get marked on the map and their nature or function is disclosed by a third party. They turn into redundant fetch quests for people that, again, must somehow tie into the faction war. At the end of the day - in this very plot-driven game - you're forced to answer a simple but very important question: "Did you find the main plot compelling?" If the answer is "Yes", then NV's game design is vindicated! If you're more like me and the answer is "No", then this game’s appeal falls apart like a house of cards. For all of its dialogue and plot choices, New Vegas is, at its core, a one-trick pony. It's a linear story that disregards all innovations brought by Bethesda (3D open-world, cool aesthetics...) and just builds on what F3 lacked (a story, non-dumb dialogue etc.)

It's actually quite hysterical that a franchise with so much potential in both story and game-play has never, to date, produced a game that harmonizes both elements and doesn't elevate one to the detriment of the other. And it's downright sad that the prospects for such is dwindling, especially after the miscarriage that is Fallout 76.

I'm just speculating, but I think the main reason for all these kinda extreme coincidences like the Enclave being in Nevada, Marcus being there, The Brotherhood, and the NCR for some reason almost staking its entire nation and military on this damn dam is because I think Sawyer and Avellone really wanted to wrap up a lot of the narrative loose ends at the end of Fallout 2. They probably thought this would be there last chance to do this and crammed in as much as possible, to the point where it was pretty much just fan service.

Also these factions don't just give you there support for no reasons, you have to do some pretty lengthy quests for them until they will help you. And yeah all these factions being coincidentally in this one area is a stretch, but since they are there I don't see how it's a problem that they all want to get involved in this battle. Depending on who wins and loses, whoever controls Vegas will definitely decide whether these factions live or die.

 

[Sug Benis]

Marcus didn’t even change a bit from his depiction in Fallout 2. His presence reeked of fan-service for the No Mutants Allowed puritans.

As for neutral parties, I think the most glaring irony is that the most important character for the Courier; Dr. Mitchell, (whom brings a Jesus back from the dead and starts the plot) is apathetic to all of the drama unfolding in Nevada, gaining no notoriety for saving the Courier’s ass.

On that note, how the fuck is this thread not full of Ulysses memes? That guy is a wellspring of autism even by ol’ Bethesda’s standards.

Yeah. For all the complaints leveled at 3 for including the Enclave, supermutants, and BoS, New Vegas includes all three with little reason as to their presence other than proximity to California. Fucking hilarious how Marcus has already failed two different times to establish a mutant settlement

Since we're talking about Ulysses:
>"You destroyed a nation that could've rivaled the BEAR and the BULL!"
>The Divide got BEARED in a single day
>"You don't think, you cause destruction wherever your road goes."
>"Why yes, I did arm the White Legs that destroyed New Canaan, directed Elijah to a pre-war technological treasure trove that could destroy the world, and got nuclear launch codes from Big MT to destroy the Mojave. Did I mention I told Caesar about Hoover Dam and New Vegas too? Why so angry, Courier?"

Ulysses is everything wrong with Chris Avellone as a writer. Deconstruction doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it doesn't matter if it's Fallout, DnD, or Star Wars, Avellone always comes off as bitter and hypocritical.

You could make the argument that he's just writing the characters that way, many people do, but for the fact that he has multiple times both confirmed that the final boss was his personal gripes about the setting and apologized for "coming across more bitter than he intended". He occasionally puts out good stuff, but otherwise his is the reverse Midas Touch, turning gold into shit.

Didn't want the legion fleshed out because muh wahmen. Ulysses, just Ulysses. Kreia from Kotor II was pretty good until endgame, where it turned into "reee star wars bad, reee force isn't fair". Neverwinter nights 2 had the dumbest companion arcs and a fucking broken morality system that was impossible to maintain for certain combinations of Lawful/Chaos Good/Evil, plus the single most idiotic point A to point B storytelling I've ever seen in a game. Strong independant wahmen beats up Vader and decides to let him go in Fallen Order? Plus he's part of the SJ push in VtM: Bloodlines 2.

I think someone at inXile even joked that one of the backer goals for Wasteland 2 would be "we won't let Avellone near the final boss".

 

[God of Nothing]

Ulysses is everything wrong with Chris Avellone as a writer. Deconstruction doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it doesn't matter if it's Fallout, DnD, or Star Wars, Avellone always comes off as bitter and hypocritical.

You could make the argument that he's just writing the characters that way, many people do, but for the fact that he has multiple times both confirmed that the final boss was his personal gripes about the setting and apologized for "coming across more bitter than he intended". He occasionally puts out good stuff, but otherwise his is the reverse Midas Touch, turning gold into shit.

Didn't want the legion fleshed out because muh wahmen. Ulysses, just Ulysses. Kreia from Kotor II was pretty good until endgame, where it turned into "reee star wars bad, reee force isn't fair". Neverwinter nights 2 had the dumbest companion arcs and a fucking broken morality system that was impossible to maintain for certain combinations of Lawful/Chaos Good/Evil, plus the single most idiotic point A to point B storytelling I've ever seen in a game. Strong independant wahmen beats up Vader and decides to let him go in Fallen Order? Plus he's part of the SJ push in VtM: Bloodlines 2.

I think someone at inXile even joked that one of the backer goals for Wasteland 2 would be "we won't let Avellone near the final boss".

I honestly think if they put any effort into the Legion beyond Caesar, people would've sided with them more. Every NCR quest is about how incompetent and useless their troops are. From the lowest trooper to Chief Hanlon to General Oliver to the fucking President, everyone is fucking up. I could not understand why anyone would want them to take over Vegas when they're already in their declining stage thanks to the Brotherhood fucking their economy into oblivion.

House is too focused on the Strip to actually do anything for the humanity he thinks he's saving and Yes Man's ending is far too ambiguous. Even with Edward more or less being in the final chapters of his life, he'd bring order to the Mojave better than the rest. Only thing he needed was a successor that wasn't Lanius, settlements to show life under the Legion isn't shit, and those terribly out of place pack mule sex slaves gone from his camp.

 

[ShortBusDriver]

Anyone here feel Dead Money gets a little too much hate? Just curious.

I really didn't enjoy it my first play though mostly becuase of a lack of bed to heal myself.

Later when I became better at combat and got access to the police station that had a bed I enjoyed it a bit more

 

[WinchesterPremium]

I honestly think if they put any effort into the Legion beyond Caesar, people would've sided with them more. Every NCR quest is about how incompetent and useless their troops are. From the lowest trooper to Chief Hanlon to General Oliver to the fucking President, everyone is fucking up. I could not understand why anyone would want them to take over Vegas when they're already in their declining stage thanks to the Brotherhood fucking their economy into oblivion.

House is too focused on the Strip to actually do anything for the humanity he thinks he's saving and Yes Man's ending is far too ambiguous. Even with Edward more or less being in the final chapters of his life, he'd bring order to the Mojave better than the rest. Only thing he needed was a successor that wasn't Lanius, settlements to show life under the Legion isn't shit, and those terribly out of place pack mule sex slaves gone from his camp.

I think the real reason that the NCR soldiers where all so incompetent all the time was because the game really wanted you to side with them. They need to be in danger so you can come in and play hero. Logically and mechanically the Legion goons usually get their buts kicked in open combat given that they mostly have pointy sticks while the NCR bothers to give everyone mid-grade firearms. You'd probably have to give the Legion more quests or content for them to be a comparable faction to the NCR.

 

[Sug Benis]

I honestly think if they put any effort into the Legion beyond Caesar, people would've sided with them more. Every NCR quest is about how incompetent and useless their troops are. From the lowest trooper to Chief Hanlon to General Oliver to the fucking President, everyone is fucking up. I could not understand why anyone would want them to take over Vegas when they're already in their declining stage thanks to the Brotherhood fucking their economy into oblivion.

House is too focused on the Strip to actually do anything for the humanity he thinks he's saving and Yes Man's ending is far too ambiguous. Even with Edward more or less being in the final chapters of his life, he'd bring order to the Mojave better than the rest. Only thing he needed was a successor that wasn't Lanius, settlements to show life under the Legion isn't shit, and those terribly out of place pack mule sex slaves gone from his camp.

Every faction was intended, per Sawyer, to have upsides and downsides.
NCR: well-meaning but corrupt and incompetent. With a bit of player-induced renovation, NCR's bureaucratic fuckups are ameliorated and it becomes stable, if restrictive and high in taxes. Viable.

Legion: dictatorial but safe and stable for those under its blanket. Brutal and inhumane to its enemies, but pretty great inside its own territory for those who don't break the law and aren't part of the actual Legion. Most of the sympathetic stuff got cut due to time constraints and fucking Avellone pushing back against it.

House: Myopic and solely focused on Vegas as a city-state, but legitimately the best hope for rebuilding an advanced space-age civilization. Most of the dick moves House pulls have reasoning behind them, and going independant then picking a different choice than his usually has negative ramifications, which does give his accusations about the viability of the other factions some credibility.

Wild Card: entirely player choice, for better or worse, and you will have to make some hard choices for the best results.

My biggest gripe about House (as someone who prefers House on the whole) is that if you make a few choices that are pro-NCR but seem the best option (like making peace in freeside) it results in House damning those areas for "siding with the enemy". He ends up being 100% right about others, like the Brotherhood and Great Khans.

Fuck the Brotherhood for reasons already enumerated and the Khans can have a peaceful ending but don't deserve it. Bitter-root did nothing wrong.