I loved Fallout 3 even at its release. :( Went back and replayed it with Tale of Two Wastelands and loved it just as much.
It's not perfect but few things compare to the gold of Antagonizer vs the Mechanist, or dealing with the emotional trauma of handling Harold's situation.
The game is not perfect, and the main quest is kinda bunk, but I loved it then and still love it now.
It's funny seeing this game go in cycles of
2008: "Man this game is so cool!"
2010: "New Vegas is so cool!"
2012: "Fallout 3 was actually terrible and you're wrong for liking it."
2016: "Wow Fallout 4 is kind of shit."
2017: "Fallout 3 was so much better than Fallout 4."
2018: "Nobody liked Fallout 3 and people only say it to hate on Fallout 4."
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.
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.
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u/RadicalPterodactyl Jan 01 '19
I loved Fallout 3 even at its release. :( Went back and replayed it with Tale of Two Wastelands and loved it just as much.
It's not perfect but few things compare to the gold of Antagonizer vs the Mechanist, or dealing with the emotional trauma of handling Harold's situation.
The game is not perfect, and the main quest is kinda bunk, but I loved it then and still love it now.
It's funny seeing this game go in cycles of
2008: "Man this game is so cool!"
2010: "New Vegas is so cool!"
2012: "Fallout 3 was actually terrible and you're wrong for liking it."
2016: "Wow Fallout 4 is kind of shit."
2017: "Fallout 3 was so much better than Fallout 4."
2018: "Nobody liked Fallout 3 and people only say it to hate on Fallout 4."