What is Fallout? What should it be?

[endgameaddiction]

 

[ritualclarity]

I loove how he doesn't list Fallout 76...

Also... this video is longer than the first game play I had with Fallout 4... FAct.

 

[bjornk]

I had only played Fallout 1 once back in 97 or 98 and finished it, although barely, cause it was literally a crash-fest back then. For the past week I've been replaying Fallout 1 again years later, although this time from within the Fallout 2 engine, which made me realize how ridiculously idiotic this game was. It's an overrated piece of garbage, especially when you look at it 25 years later. No, it's not the turn-based combat, not the interface, not the setting, it is the story and how the game was designed. There's some shit in this game which is at least on par with Bethesda, possibly even worse. While I agree with the tone change and some of the other aspects of later games mentioned in the video, I also think that this guy is romanticizing the first game to the extreme.

There are so many things in this game that annoyed the hell outta me, but one thing I really can't stand is this, the game has many smart-mouthed NPCs who either treat you like garbage or try to make fun of you, if you dare to talk back, then they immediately attack you. Literally. They draw their weapon and start shooting at you, just because you said something which annoyed them. In fact, not just them, the entire town turns against you and starts attacking you, literally everyone, even the fucking children. And if you somehow manage to survive and kill them in self-defense, YOU lose karma, not them, as if you've done an evil thing by trying to stay alive. Not to mention that in random encounters, two different groups who would/should normally attack each other (e.g. ghouls vs. raiders) gang up on you together. To the idiots who designed this garbage, here's your belated FUCK YOU!

This so-called role-playing game assumes that you're gonna be the idiotic goody two-shoes, who is nice to everyone, says "yes" to everything, tolerates every scumbag and runs around like a headless chicken in order to right all the wrongs in the wasteland. What a fucking nightmare! Also, while this garbage of a game let's you pick a female player character, it keeps reminding you that the PC is supposed to be a guy, cause aside from a couple of dialogues of no importance, everything else clearly feels like they were designed with a male PC in mind.

And the goddamn game has multiple time limits, some hidden. The 150 days to find a water chip may be tolerable, but there's another hidden one. After 500 in-game days it's "vault invasion time" which is "game over" quite literally, once you've reached that limit the game ends -even when you're in the middle of a fight- and goes back to the main menu. You are never ever informed that there's an additional 500 days time limit. If you've somehow revealed the location of your vault, this limit is even less.

Here's just an example of the retarded stuff early in the game:

An inconsequential NPC: "My girl... uh, Tandi, has been kidnapped."
Female PC: "I'm sorry, I wish I could help. I've got my own problems to worry about"
An inconsequential NPC: "I thought you were a good person. So be it."
<PC reinitiates dialogue to barter>
An inconsequential NPC: "Where's Tandi? Why haven't you rescued her?"
Female PC: (WTF!? I've never said I would rescue her)
Female PC: "I decided the little tramp wasn't worth the risk." (Facts)
An inconsequential NPC: "You bastard!" <ATTACKS>...entire town turns hostile...

By the way, "The little tramp" is described as "About 6 feet tall. Blonde. She's from Shady Sands."

Some more crap from the early game:

Bunch of guards in Junktown keep complaining about a gang called Skulz, which automatically goes into your Pipboy as a "quest" to do, as if you've accepted it... Fine, you go and talk to one of these gang members, a bitch called Sherry or something, she talks about how she enjoys being in this gang and then threatens you, if you talk back and say "Bring it on!" then she and the whole gang in the back starts attacking you, which may seem okay to you, but wait, you run away from them without attacking back to safety, but to your surprise, you realize that even those guards who were complaining about this gang are now attacking you... WTF!?

Some guy called Doc Morbid, sells human body parts as "snacks" to a guy called Iguana Bob, if you go to his basement (he's okay with it) and talk to his midget helper you can learn about their deal, but if you attempt to check the box full of body parts the midget attacks you. If you defend yourself and kill him, YOU lose karma, yeah, not the people who sell body parts as snacks. There's not a single authority to report this "activity" in the whole town, neither the guards nor the so called lawful mayor Kilian is interested. All you can do with this information is to blackmail Iguana Bob later in the game, and you can't report him to the authorities either and if you decide to blackmail Bob, YOU will lose reputation each time you do. If you refuse to pay this so called doctor who tries to rip you off, his goons attack you and if you kill the doctor who sells human body parts, again, YOU lose karma...

etc. etc.

In an interview with Tim Cain, he claimed that the game didn't force you to kill people, which is certainly true, cause it literally forces you to DIE instead, which makes a pacifist play-through impossible. His motto must be: Play the game my way, or DIE. This is one of the reasons why there's been "min-maxing" guides for "feasible" player characters. It's amazing how some people can call this crap as "role playing"... Even if you want to be that goody two-shoes of a guy, you can't, cause at some point you'll definitely get punished for it. There's no consistent morality in the game, sometimes morality is turned upside down, sometimes it's completely removed, it works differently from situation to situation and the player is encouraged to manipulate everything to get the most out of things. It's all horseshit riddled with hypocrisy.

And the same goes to Fallout 2...

Player: "I'm gonna be a peaceful pacifist this time, gonna talk my way through things using my charisma and speech skills..."
Game: Welcome to the Temple of Trials... it's full of ants, poisonous scorpions, traps... and a tribal who will kill you in a so called not-to-the-death fistfight... Neither of these can be "convinced" to let you through...

TL;DR    Fallout Series =

Edited March 17, 2023 by bjornk

[KHL]

Started modding about the time FO$ came out. Liked it well enough for awhile until I played TTW and noticed the difference. Long story short is I still play TTW and haven't really played FO$ in years. Said it was crap on other sites and got attacked by rabid fan bois. Franchise is pretty much dead. Dev studio isn't far behind.

 

 

Edited March 24, 2023 by KHL

[bjornk]

Fallout New Vegas... what a piece of trash this game is. Not only it's a bug infested crash-fest that runs much worse than Skyrim despite literally being a FO3 mod, but its design is also mindbogglingly stupid; bullet sponge enemies, weapon damage tied to gun skill, irradiated food/water that only affects the player, must use the pipboy to wear/equip something etc. But the most annoying thing for me is its retarded karma system. Take some junk or trash that's lying around, eat some rotten food, and the game will give you "bad karma", cause apparently even a bent tin can seemingly thrown away as garbage has an "owner". Stealing from the Powder Gangers gives you bad karma, killing them "good karma". Why? Is thievery worse than murder? Kill the owner of a container and the container still keeps its owner, you get bad karma if you steal from it, but hey, you can loot the owner with no consequences... It's quite amazing to see how some people have been praising this shit and its "karma system". Fallout has six major games as series and except for "tactics" which I have never played, all of them are total crap. The first Fallout at least was unique and original for its time, the rest are nothing but copycats and are just as bad or worse in every aspect.

[endgameaddiction]

I think the number one issue regarding Bethesda and their development of Fallout and Elder's Scrolls is the fact that they continue to dumb the games down to cater to the more larger group of people who don't want to invest in reading, figuring out puzzles and traps, and taking the time to flesh out your character based on the class you pick which will come with both pros and cons because a perfect character should never exist in a role-playing game.

For me. the franchise died with Fallout 4. There are so many things they did wrong with that game that they should've known better from previous developed sequels. That and the removal of things that should have never been removed like weapon and armor degradation. I could go on and on but I've already reached the point that I don't care what happens to Fallout. It could diminish for good and I couldn't care less.

[bjornk]

8 hours ago, endgameaddiction said:

I think the number one issue regarding Bethesda and their development of Fallout and Elder's Scrolls is the fact that they continue to dumb the games down to cater to the more larger group of people who don't want to invest in reading, figuring out puzzles and traps, and taking the time to flesh out your character based on the class you pick which will come with both pros and cons because a perfect character should never exist in a role-playing game.

One of the reasons they dumb things down is to cater to a larger audience, as you said. The other one is, dumbing things down means less work, less work means they will be able to work on another game in a much shorter time which will keep investors happy, and they will have to deal with a relatively smaller set of bugs and glitches. Imagine Skyrim, quests, NPCs, spells, pretty much everything in the game has at least one associated bug. If it had a more complicated design, imagine how things would be. It'd be much more difficult for them to make things work in the game.

9 hours ago, endgameaddiction said:

For me. the franchise died with Fallout 4. There are so many things they did wrong with that game that they should've known better from previous developed sequels. That and the removal of things that should have never been removed like weapon and armor degradation.

There was no weapon/armor degradation in the original games, that was probably introduced by Bethesda. Good idea in terms of realism, but poorly implemented. Having to rely on picking up junk to repair things while having a limited inventory space can become really frustrating in a short time. I give credit to Bethesda for one thing though and it's VATS. It was a relatively good alternative to the body part based attacks in the original games, which, by the way, they could've improved and could've made it work on TES series as well, but they chose not to.

Bethesda created a Fallout themed/flavored Oblivion (i.e. Oblivion with guns) and their adoption of ideas in Fallout was very superficial. While Obsidian did a better job in FNV in that regard, they weren't fully in sync with it either, as most of the Obsidian people (e.g. Avellon, Sawyer, Urquhart) who worked on the original games, weren't really involved in the design of the 1st game. Because of that, FNV has some annoyingly superficial approaches to Fallout, perhaps to a lesser extend when compared to Bethesda, but they're there. I've personally never cared for Fallout 4 once I realized what it was and I'm not more interested in Fallout 5 than I'm interested in Fallout 77. Just like you, Fallout is a dead franchise to me.

[KHL]

On 3/26/2023 at 7:14 PM, bjornk said:

less work means they will be able to work on another game in a much shorter time which will keep investors happy,

Yeah, that clearly worked out for them I guess.

Starfield has over 7 years of development time (longer actually) and is being shit on everywhere on the net. Mods literally cannot fix this piece of shit. I dare the community to even try, lol.

Edited January 17 by KHL

[Kendo 2]

[KHL]

4 hours ago, Kendo 2 said:

Raise the already stupidly high (thus meaningless from an RPG perspective) level cap? Fuck no. And bring back the skill points and checks ffs. level 200, can do everything, is super OP is not fucking challenging or fun.

Keep the same ugly fucking art style that literally made the world boring and uninteresting to look at? Nope.

And make it procedurally generated which is what literally everyone hates about Starshit? Goddam Idiot.

Make every area respawn literally right after you leave it (because of buggy design) giving the player no sense of accomplishment/completion? Fuck no.

No in game world/settlement building? Fuck, that's one aspect of FO4 that I halfway enjoyed.

Better A.I./interactions from/with companions/enemies? With literally no back story to support their existence and them being basically one dimensional cardboard dummies to shoot at.... it won't fucking matter. Especially if the combat and weapons aren't completely overhauled and made fun again.

Just no, no, no. They need to tear this fucking IP back down to it's original conceptual structure and rebuild the whole fucking franchise from scratch for modern times. Bring back the dismal, gloomy, dead serious atmosphere. And for the love of fucking gaming, hire competent writers to breathe life into it.

Edited January 18 by KHL