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?!
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.