Spoilers for a 13 year old game that got retconned anyways
For those who don't know, at the end of Fallout 3 you have to go into a heavily irradiated room to prevent a big water purifier from exploding. Your character will die but your act of self-sacrifice gives everyone in the wasteland clean water which had been very rare up to that point. However it's been previously established (explicitly and several times) that supermutants are immune to radiation, and the game has a very prominent supermutant companion: Fawkes. You would think you could just ask Fawkes to go into the radiation chamber, but no, you get this incredibly stupid line and are forced to kill yourself. Fawkes up to this point has been very selfless and one of the kindest characters in the game.
Like how do you fuck up writing your game so badly this situation is even possible?!
Like every companion that should logically be able to do it will refuse to do it
Charon, the ghoul who is actively healed by radiation and sworn to do whatever his contract holder says, won't do it
The Robot won't do it
Cherry or Sherry or whatever that slave girl you can get won't do it
Like, what the actual fuck
Don't you more or less kill your entire vault at the beginning of the game? I've never played 3 but wouldn't that vault has a super handy GECK in there? Same with the shit ton of other vaults that seem to be in them? My ex plated three and I saw bits n pieces
Ah, but they put a child skeleton in a bathtub with a rubber duck or whatever, the environmental storytelling is so great.
but but but, the enclaves that dropped their forks thru the grated floor hahahahaha wow!
The Enclave base you get transported to when you get the GECK has a mess hall with a grated floor. You can go below that floor to a basement area filled with silverware that dropped through the grates.
Haha, yeah I think I missed that bit.
If the Enclave is effectively the remaining continuation of the pre-war US, then them simply abandoning dropped silverware and presumably replacing it with new silverware is quite an expression of American excess and carelessness.
They're just smaller adult skeletons with adult skulls.
That or they're children with very tiny heads.
I find stuff like this extra funny because I joined a New Vegas meme group on Facebook a few months ago but it's totally become overrun with fallout 3 fan boys insisting it's better than NV and writing embarrassing screeds where they praise stuff like this
Are all mediocre but accepted installations of a fandom destined to be ironically enjoyed and memed on up until a new generation forgets that they suck and starts unironically praising them? Like fuck me are people serious on reddit about liking the star wars prequels? I loved Fallout 3 when it came out but in hindsight its janky as fuck. Who is out there dying on this hill?
yo ive said this before but im gonna die on this hill
if youre coming to fallout 3 cos you want a great story youre gonna have a bad time cos bethesda did not give a single fuck about the story and neither should you. what it wants to be is a dicking around in the wasteland simulator and i reckon it does this pretty well in an engine thats perfectly suited to it. im not gonna pretend its amazing or anything but its pretty good at doing what it wants to do, and i do think it gets shat on much harder than it deserves
new vegas is built around this story that it really really wants to tell and it wants to be another fallout1/2, and its not that its a bad story underneath its just that its in the worst storytelling engine imaginable and all the dialogue is being spouted by oblivion faces that are scientifically impossible to take seriously, and it just ends up as the worst of both worlds. put it in the wasteland 3 engine and it would be a great game
fallout 2 is still by far the best tho
I don't understand how you can complain about the New Vegas engine being terrible for storytelling and impossible to take seriously and then go "aw, but FO2 tho"
im confused by this, do you mean because the dialogue is mostly unvoiced? and cos most of the characters dont have close-up portraits?
the original fallout 1/2 engine was built around having lots of dialogue and lots of branching dialogue based on all sorts of other triggers and its been a long while since ive played it but i cant recall anything wrong with it? its pretty much the same dialogue system that newer games like pillars of eternity still use for spewing out ridiculous amounts of text
and i will 1000% take unvoiced dialogue every time for an in-depth rpg, voiced dialogue is an expensive time-consuming tradeoff that i mostly click through anyway and mostly serves to ruin characters with bad voice acting rather than improving them with good voice acting. i like the old trick of important characters getting their first line or two voiced so it gives you the idea and then leaving the rest unvoiced. and likewise i would much rather have no portrait than a bad portrait, good writing can give the imagination a picture whereas a bad portrait just takes me straight out of the conversation. and the few 3d portraits that fallout 1 and 2 did have were pretty good at the time (though they may not have aged well idk)
idk, I didn't find the voice acting in the newer fallouts that bad.
I was much more engaged playing say NV then I was playing FO2, and I think the weird claymationesque portraits for people in the original games is a lot harder to take seriously then the models in NV.those portraits looked amazing when i was a kid and idk maybe its the nostalgia talking but i just looked them up and i reckon they still look pretty good (though admittedly a bit goofy, but that kinda fits with the vibe)
i do think that oblivion and by extension the fallouts had the absolute worst character faces ive ever seen in a game, to the point that i cannot take any of the characters seriously, and they completely take me out of the story when they take up most of the screen during dialogue (a problem oblivion and fallout 3 solved by just having the stupidest stories imaginable so it didnt really matter)
for a point of comparison, vampire the masquerade bloodlines came out earlier with similar branched fully-voiced dialogue, and both the character faces and voice acting are just orders of magnitude better
See, idk, I think the faces in Oblivion look ridiculous, but I never really had that same vibe with them in New Vegas.
Agreed, NV faces still have a little of that stiff weirdness to them, but Oblivion faces are actually terrifying half the time.
Hear me out: The Star Wars Prequels got reassessed first as cringe humor, but theres also an appreciation of bad film making that feels more sincere, in its badness, specifically in comparison to todays MCU landscape.
I think the overall vision for the PT, and the basic wireframe of the narrative, had a ton of potential. The last years of the corrupt republic, the Clone Wars, the role of Jedi and Sith in that conflict, and the expanded lore from that era is all cooler and more interesting than just about any of the capeshit schock blockbuster studios make nowadays.
Too bad Lucas botched it with first draft scripts written a week before filming started and apparently without the same creative drive that helped create the magic of the OT in the first place.
I had this fucking nerd at work accuse me of liking something that I used to like as a kid out of nostalgia. Joke was on him cause it was something I was 20 when I saw it, but even still, I have rewatched most stuff I recall liking as a child and can absolutely say a great deal was crap.
There 2 factors to this:
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playing/watching things as a kid and seeing past its flaws because kids don't usually notice if something is bad
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in the current era of the internet for most people the worst thing you can be is Cringe. The easiest way to be cringe is to like something people consider bad. Combine this principle with (1) and you'll have people defending things to the death they enjoyed but ignored/unnoticed why/how it was bad. This is why you have 20-30 something who were kids defend the Prequels to the death, along with other bad things like FO3
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Hot take: all of the Fallout games are overrated and none of them are particularly well-written.
Nothing wrong with enjoying them but I don't get why people want to turn them into something thoughtful and highbrow that they just aren't.
Video games have a super low bar to clear for being considered smart.
People pay to see the MCU so it's not as if its unique to vidya
Can we talk about why they decided to build Megaton around a literal bomb??
Like if you are survivors of a nuclear war scouring the wastelands why would you stop at a bombsite and be like "yeah here is good."It's theme park design
Each place has a thing that makes you go "Ooh" and that's it
Don't even think the game gives you an in-universe explanation other than "We did it, why not?"
Honestly, after playing 4 and NV I was disappointed with the world of FO3.
Megaton is kind of ugly...the whole setting is pretty ugly....which I can get as an artistic choice....but I don't super care for it.Rivet City was really the only place I thought was interesting and unlike Megaton kind of makes sense why people who move/settle there.
There was that "town" with the VtMesque quest, but it was more like a three building farmstead of something.
When I heard about Canterbury Commons I thought it was gonna be alot more than just like....two buildings and three blokes.
I think Bunker Hill in 4 pulled off the "caravanner hub city" thing better tbh.Everything just felt kind of dead tbh....which like....yeah post-apocalypse....but it's not the most fun world to explore.
I guess Pentenny Tower was pretty good....and tbh I never found Paradise Falls because I wasn't expecting the main quest to finish so quickly and then the game was over.That's what happens when the devs refuse to innovate past an engine that can't render more than 10 NPCs.
The water around megaton shouldn't have been radioactive and should have been some of the cleanest water available cause of the constant irradiation which should kill pretty much anything in there.
yup, and then the morally complex decision regarding Megaton is "do you want to nuke a town full of people for literally no reason, or do you want to not do that?"
Wrath of Khan but they bring Data along and he says "just kill urself lmao"
I can picture that very vividly and it's hilarious. Also Data wouldn't be born for another like 75 years or so
It's also frustrating because I was expecting there to be an opportunity to explore the world after this, but nope. You die, the end.
It's so dumb the game just ends, like what other open world games does that. It's even dumber they waited until the third DLC to fix this.
"If you get into this hot tub and relax we can purify all the water in this hellscape!"
"I'd rather you die doing actually."
The best part is the original release of the game didn't have the option to ask him to enter the chamber. They added it in specifically to explain why he wouldn't, even though it doesn't explain anything, and also the point is moot because in the DLC the Lone Wanderer survives and everything's fine.
Wait that was them covering their ass?! Like program in an ambush where all of your companions get knocked unconscious or something. Frankly it's better when they didn't say anything becuase it just draws attention to how stupid it is.
Haha yeah I'm just learning that, too. I just assumed they threw this half-assed bullshit in because they needed a placeholder until they got Broken Steel out, but instead they originally had nothing here and ADDED this lmao
got to sell that DLC somehow. What do you mean you expect to be able to freely roam around in your open world game after the story is done? (NV is guilty of this too but they at least have the excuse of not being able to finish the game)
Also, New Vegas gives you an opportunity to turn around and go do stuff if you don't want to enter the endgame
I don't recall getting any warning about that before you storm Project Purity
The epic second battle of Hoover dam where I tell the people I don't like to go home and then they do.
I kill Caesar's Legion anyway because I want to scatter them to the winds now
One of those game endings that just pissed me off, like ME3. Haven't touched either game since.
If the game had any fucking guts, it would have killed everyone you brought with you off, one by one. Anyone you didn't bring on the Suicide mission gets an ending.
There's no point since everyone in fallout 3 is incredibly boring
Well if they wanted a better way out of the “why not have the radiation proof character do the radiation room?”
Watch this shit. Ready?
BOOM
[The Enclave sabotage has sealed the doors behind you, leaving no way out and trapping your companion behind you.]
Wow, it's that easy.
This is what happens when you write backward from the ending. New Vegas has several companions and one even gets you extra help in the final battle if you complete their personal quest. The other ones also just alter the ending slightly in general. They thought about how every quest and companion would affect the ending.
For Fallout 3 they wanted a specific ending, and then when they added things that could contradict that ending they just decided to ignore them because it's easier that way. They wrote in a heroic sacrifice involving a radiation chamber, then added in 3 companions that are also immune to radiation. Solution? Just make the companions not be there. Their solution? Make the companions all have some weird reason why they can't do it.
I like Fallout 3, and most of its "bad" design decisions are either justifiable on some level or not easily fixable, but this one is just baffling.
