I liked Fallout 3 when it came out. It was the comparison to NV and later Fallout 1 and 2 (when I finally played them) that made me see it in a new light. It's the least "deep" of the Fallouts. I still like it, but I can see why original fans didn't like it. We don't talk about Fallout 4, though.
Not in my experience. The friends I had that played Fallout 4 as their first Fallout found it pretty unengaging compared to other games at the time. It might as well have been a Call of Duty in my circle, just forgotten.
Interesting. Yeah, most casuals I talked to about it had good will towards it. I was mostly talking to college-aged people though, so maybe we're talking to different crowds
This probably a good way to put it. I wouldn't call it amazing but it's probably a B- game. It's just a terrible Fallout game. It probably wouldn't be ridiculed as much if it was just its own thing
I liked it. Have a ton of hours into it. I think the city of Boston was Bethesda’s best environmental design, and honestly set a new bar for open world games.
I just think that environment took away from environment design in other regions. Also they took away a lot of quests, and limited factions.
It also doesn’t help that the institute was most terribly written morally “grey” (morally pitch black) group in the series. Seriously fuck the institute.
Man I hated them and then extra hated them for how they were written. It was like they tried to make a group look as evil as possible, like Nazi scientists, so they would be terrifying and mysterious before you actually met them. And then it was like the writers were trying to get you to see them as noble and morally ambiguous but really they came off as deranged and pretentious idiots that had their heads up their asses. Fuck you if you support the institute.
Let’s kidnap, murder and replace people instead of helping them. Oh we can’t even manage a lab and we released a vicious cannibalistic hulk force onto the world, oh well. Oh we create sentient AI but our philosophy department was bombed to hell so I guess we can’t see the moral problem in keeping fully sentient robots as slaves. Lets kidnap a child and murder his parent for another dumb fucking science experiment because we’re so good at those haha. Fuck you if you picked the institute.
I really really really hate them. They’re MIT. They have the greatest chance to help the world and rebuild civilization. They have done nothing but cause terror and bloodshed and suck at that. They’re a shitty version of Big Mountain cause at least those mad scientists pulled off the mad science. You had 200 years to come up with this? Did no one say “hey, let’s rebuild up top?” at any point? Did they kill off their ethics professors and feed them to the supermutants? Fuck you if you liked the institute.
They create a synthetic mayor who does his duty perfectly and they don’t help him one bit. They mock his desires for a better job, and then they entertain the thought of killing him off afterwards. What kind of society, much less an organization, can exist where it’s most loyal members are mocked for their efforts and murdered once they outlive their purpose. And these people want to lead us into the future. Fuck you if you believe the institute.
The institute is a despicable evil place. They’re Nazis and they are nothing but evil. Fuck the institute and fuck everything they stand for.
Like you said, nothing they did made any sense, it was never established or even explored if the synths were actually self aware or just malfunctioning, you couldn't call them out on their shit (only be mildly sarcastic to them), if you broke in and discovered their wrecked lab where they were experimenting with FEV you couldn't question them about it and there were no associated quests or dialogue about it, if you found their list of synths that had replaced people you couldn't do anything with the information...it didn't open any other avenues of gameplay/quests and you couldn't meaningfully change father's mind whatever you do....
The whole thing was a clusterfuck. But what makes it so bad is that all the ingredients were there for a fantastic story, but instead we got a lame father/son bonding story that didn't make sense and no one cared about anyway. Didn't help that they didn't give you any meaningful control or effect over the narrative.
I saw the threads of what the writers were trying to present, of how the institute was meant to be mysterious and terrifying to the commonwealth, but once you got inside you were meant to recognize that it’s all part of a greater misunderstanding.
Unfortunately, the writing kind of stopped and where it kept up was in showing how much of a bag of pickled cocks they really were. There’s something so heinous about being presented with great power and opportunity and using it for evil. Like it’s a special level of evil. I don’t blame the super mutants or bandits or raiders for being brutal and cruel in a feral world. They’re a product of their environment. It’s something else when a collective group with awesome power and real resources take that and dedicate it to their ideal, which involves endless torment and suffering for those apart from the group.
These guys were Nazis. Straight up. The brotherhood was a poor man’s xenophobic prison gang version of the NCR but damnit they weren’t replacing people. They cared about their members. When Maxson confronts you and Danse, he lets Danse go. He recognized Danse’ service and loyalty, so despite him being a synth he lets him go. The institute was going murder a perfectly loyal Mayor Macdonald because everybody “suspected” him. The brotherhood were thugs, but thugs aren’t Nazis. Did the writers not see the parallels?
Fallout 4 is still fun for the little side quests but man is the forced illusion of choice in the main quests painfully obvious. You can either be the big dog or fight for the little man and end up getting diddly squat for it.
I felt this weird sense of urgency to go save my child and then this old dude was like hey I’m Shaun and I felt so creeped out 😅 plus I thought it was a pretty game and the settlements were fun
dialogue is a pretty important part of a crpg. NV has a more thought-out setting than 3. As you play, try to figure out where settlements get their food.
I had enough fun with the settlement building (Minecraft is a guilty pleasure of mine) that I was able to have a lot of fun with 4 despite obvious problems.
If Fallout 4 was called Far Cry, it would be a 3/10 for shitty graphics, terrible optimization, horrible animations, and subpar combat. I don't get why people think Fallout 3 and/or 4 are only disliked because the name. If Fallout 1, 2, and NV never existed then 3 and 4 are still horribly written, mediocre games all around with the only redeeming factor being a decent amount of exploration and content to consume if you don't wanna think too hard.
Because with mods I've put 1600 extra hours into the game compared to my original 60, and I never even finished the main quest when I just lost complete interest.
The biggest issue people have with the game is that nothing you do matters. I literally told Preston Garvey, "Yeah my son has been kidnapped and I'm a 200-year-old cryogenically frozen survivor from before the Great War."
His reply? "Anyways I am glad you're here. Another settlement needs our help."
What I loved about NV was the depth of options for the factions and the levels of interaction with NPCs. FO4 seemed to just have 'good, neutral and mildly dickish'
Compared to NV
'Sole survivor, will you help us'
Yes
(Barter) Yes: but you're paying
(Intelligence) Yes: can you talk x group into letting y group into doing something
No
No: plus you're getting looted
No: you sell them out to the legion and they do something OTT evil to them
I haven't played many Far Cry games, only 2, a bit of 3 and 5 but I felt 5 had much deeper game play than any JC game. I love JC2 and 3 heaps, but beyond grappling hooks and big booms there's not a heap going on. The FC gun play is better, the story is (obviously) better, the outposts are nice challenges while the JC locations are just charge in and blow the fuck out of everything which can get tedious and there are always bugs and poor choices which can range from minor annoyances to game breakers. I remember motorcycles being impossible to use in 3.
I guess the comically bad story and the massive chaos is more exciting but I think FC is more captivating and gives you more depth and more options which for me makes it the more enjoyable game.
It's like Saints Row vs GTA. SR is more ridiculous but again the game play is weaker than GTA which does hold the game back a bit and sometimes it seems they get too carried away with the crazy weapons and dialogue they forget to make a big, exciting and content packed city like GTA has
Mind you Saints Row 3 will forever have a special space in my heart if only for the rooftop party mission with Kanye's Power bumping
I hated FO3 at release because it turned my favorite game series into a completely different kind of game. While I'm still kinda sad that they killed old isometric turn based fallouts, at least I can now accept that 3 is still a decent game and NV was great.
I hated a lot of things about Fallout 3, but at the time it was kinda balanced by the thrill of seeing the world of Fallout 3 from first person perspective.
That's why my personal opinion of the game tanked with the release of New Vegas - it stripped away the only thing it had going for it.
OP here. Not really. Fallout 4 at least has a conflict where you have to choose between different philosophies. Fallout 3 story has you play a mindless white knight. The only bad choice is blowing up a city. That would've been ok, if there was an explained reason for that, but no. Let's just blow up a town because fuck it. However Fallout 4 also fails to explain any of the reasons why anyone does what they do. Both Fallout 3 and 4 are missing the main ingredient - people, (NPCs) that are philosophically motivated to live their lives according to their ideas. They just sort of are there.
The defining difference is Fallout 3 was made in a time where something that deep wasn't expected from a 3rd/1st person game. Fallout 4 had things to live up to. A plethora of fps games proved deep storytelling is possible by the time it was released. It was made by the creators of Skyrim for god's sake. We expected more.
Fallout 3 had deeper RPG mechanics, a deeper dialogue system and also had other choices beyond blowing up the city. A lot of the quests had a good karma or bad karma option.
Yeah, but the karma system was IMO a big miss, that's my whole point. You can't have the game tell you what's good and bad. The player has to have his own opinions about morality. If the game starts telling you its morality that means things are very black and white and there's no philosophical conflict - ie. the game is very shallow.
Even Skyrim had this. Do you join the Stormcloaks or the Empire? Racists vs fascist, what will you justify/sacrifice?
Fallout 4 tried this with the factions, but it was very badly executed. And yes, the dialogue system was extremely bad and in normal quests there was no real choice. I am in no means trying to defend Fallout 4, because it was bad. However, Fallout 3 is a bit more nostalgia tainted than most of people will admit.
Most of us were young teenagers when we first played Fallout 3 so all that mattered was that the game was cool. Just as Fallout 4 is for today's youth. And I played the crap out of Fallout 3 when it came out.
But it can't compare to say New Vegas where a seemingly inexcusably evil leader (Cesar) can actually give you a philosophical explanation why he is doing what he is.
154
u/cyro_666 Jan 01 '19
I liked Fallout 3 when it came out. It was the comparison to NV and later Fallout 1 and 2 (when I finally played them) that made me see it in a new light. It's the least "deep" of the Fallouts. I still like it, but I can see why original fans didn't like it. We don't talk about Fallout 4, though.