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?!
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.
I agree with this old man rant
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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.
Nostalgia is a very powerful drug
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:
playing/watching things as a kid and seeing past its flaws because kids don't usually notice if something is bad
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