A perfect Fallout game - by MATN

That is factually false, and many of the best games don't show the main mechanic first. I mean, Ocarina of Time is lauded as the best game by many and the first mechanic that it shows is how to target with the Z button. Is that the main mechanic of the game? No, it's one of several mechanics.

The hilarity of thinking Fallout 3's main mechanic is speech checks when at release some people complained that New Vegas had too many.

That is also factually false. Fallout 3 makes combat so much more prevalent to the point of the detriment of every other mechanic.

I know he made the video for views, but the main problem here is that a lot of his fans are eating up what he says and think every point he makes is valid. To the point that in any debate about Fallout 3 after the video was released there's always at least one person saying for people to watch the video to see good arguments about why the game is good.

 

This is one of the points he was right on though

 

Only if you ignore the context in which he mentioned the point in:

He has clearly watched Hbombereguy's video on the topic: Hbomberguy explains how outside of random encounters, when you interact with humans, every player's first experience will likely be non-violent:

When you reach the end of the Temple of Trials you're told you must fight Cameron to prove you're martial prowess, if you ask why you must fight him he'll tell you that you will inherently come across a situation whereby you must be prepared to respond with violence to another human being. With a high enough Speech skill you can say "I disagree, I think a non-violent resolution can be found for every conflict" to which he'll respect that. This subtley reinforces to high-speech characters that violence is avoidable and a last resort.

The first human antagonists your likely to come across in Fallout 1 are the Khans, who don't attack you on sight but rather can be dealt with in a variety of ways: Speech checks, being given money for Tandi's release, a high enough luck skill and leather jacket meaning you're mistaken for Garl Deathhand's father, ect.

When Hbomberguy mentions the Vault 101 Sequence, he doesn't say violence is literally not an option, he says that the way the game is designed is to encourage mindless violence against ordinary people: these are the same Vault Security Guards who 5 minutes earlier were at your Birthday Party, and unless killed by Radroaches, they will immediately go hostile on you with no alternative, and will chase you to the end of the Vault, and that given that you're stuck in a corridor with them, there is effectively no choice but to kill them, not literally no choice but to kill them. The game is designed for you to see them as mindless goons as soon as possible.

The fact that it's not a mandatory objective to kill them doesn't take away from the fact that the game conditions you in to thinking there is no peaceful resolution. MATN's point only makes sense if you ignore any surrounding context or nuanced points that Hbomb was making.

Literally avoiding the entire way the game was designed to go for a non-violent route isn't proof that the game included a non-violent option. It's proof that you can cheese the game in such a way to make it possible.

 

Yeah, i highly doubt Bethesda allowed the ability to jump over the security officers as intended. It seems more of the usual unintended exploits their games are infamous for having.

 

Ok after watching over 3 hours(why?) of this I just had to mention one thing.

MATN says that New Vegas doesn’t have a lot of dungeons due to “not having enough stuff to reward the player with” which hardly makes any sense at all.

But this other guy is saying that the reason FNV didn’t have a lot of dungeons was because of rushed development.

I personally think that the lack of dungeons is a deliberate design choice. Dungeons are probably the worst part of any fallout game. It’s mostly mindless combat, which is particularly grating due to the gameplay of fallout 3/NV. There are much more towns than dungeons in the original games, and I always figured that Obsidian wanted to make the game in that style. With more focus on quest and skill choices, and less focus on combat.

 

Indeed, dungeons become like filler to extend the gameplay and to hide that there aren't more quests with various solutions or interesting places that do not rely on combat.

The combat gameplay in Fallout 3/4 is not that good, not even the one in Fallout 4 is that interesting even if it plays smoother as it doesn't hide that there is not meaning or purpose to places other than to go in and shoot enemies while collecting all kinds of crap.

That pyramid in the middle of the glowing sea? Just a dungeon full of Ghouls. Nothing of interest there other than some quest to collect some crap for the BOS I think.

 

I don't know why we have to keep retreading old ground on fallout videos why not something fresh, original, and insane? Why don't you see anybody saying Fallout 3 and 4 are Orwellian psychological experiments trying to measure the player's propensity for psychopathy or something? You guys think that Bethesda gets analytics from your playthroughs? I could've sworn that Fallout 3.exe connected to Bethesda at some point. Maybe that's why they're still using the same engine... Maybe the old ass architecture is a screen door to road map a player's destruction and choices through the game world. Oh no, that's why all the quests are black and white. IT'S TO PUT YOU IN A BOX. TRAPPED LIKE A RAT IN A MAZE! OH GOOOOD. You know fun twilight zone shit like that.

It'd be easy enough to bullshit a story there's already a quest that takes place in a simulation run by a psychopath and fallout 4 VR is a thing. Slap a VR headset on the younglings and record the beta brainwave activity while they're getting "reeducated" in room 101. Pull out the ones that qualify for low empathy and groom them for politics or the military. Bada bing bada boom, my grant check is late MIT.

 

Even with that, a lot of the dungeons in New Vegas are better than Fallout 3's just by the fact they aren't copy and pasted nonsense that only exists to fuel a philosophy of giving the player constant rushes of dopamine to hide the fact that most of the locations in the game have literally nothing of value when it comes to anything that matters to a RPG.

I honestly take Repconn Headquarters in New Vegas over most, if not all, dungeons in Fallout 3.

Of couse New Vegas has less dungeons than in Fallout 3 and it's not because it has less stuff to reward the player with, but because Obsidian was more interested in making a believable world and not a theme park.

 

I'm scratching my head trying to remember when Fallout was supposed to be a dungeon crawler.

 

You see, it was always the plan to make Fallout into a first person looter shooter, Black Isle Studios just didn’t have the budget or technology to realize this, so they had to settle for a turn-based isometric RPG with interesting quests instead.

 

I like how they Stone and Parker have no concept of subtlety. Like it was obviously a George Lucas dig Before they talked about the Imperial Walkers.

 

Fair enough, I always felt the Imperial Walkers line added to the absurdity of the joke.

 

i don't see how the situation in vault 101 is proof you can't choose non-violent option without "Cheesing" the game. In your first encounter with Security Officer Kendall? you can use the bathroom and go that direction until you reach butch's mother's room. I get that the majority of player's will not do this since the majority of players will take the gun from amata or the bat from their desk. and just go swinging at them even if their not built for melee combat or shooting your way through the vault to get to the door. but The only part where this is a bit iffy is when you go to Security Chief Hannon's room your supposed to meet him in and he goes hostile. but i think it's not supposed to be immediately obvious by design in that case. you can go hide in the corner behind some thing and wait for him to pass by and then go after that your home free and it's just a matter of not helping amata which you can do btw. but i see your point how it does look like cheesing. but i don't think it is cheesing since you can completely choose not to kill Security Officer Gomez since he's friendly towards you by default, and the other option where you duck down into the bathroom and escape through their while Kendall is dealing with the radroaches you just used as a distraction. You can completely avoid the guards with guns who stand near the entrance to vault 101 by sneaking and staying far back it's not really designed for you to shoot them. though i assume you absolutely can if you want to try and save that girl at the very least i did it at least once. again it only really gets iffy when you reach the room your supposed to meet security officer hannon and he go hostile on you but again you can hide and escape when he's well passed you. there's even some dialogue for Hannon if he survives the night, he talks about how is son died that night to you when you tried to escape etc. i found him in the overeseers office i believe when i returned to vault 101. So the game does definitely have this as an option where hannon lives. Of course Kendall disappears from the game completely i believe. as do the other security officers with guns and the ones that run out of the room when you open the vault door and talk to amata.

 

My problem with Vault 101- security are mindless goons, there's no difference whether they died or lived despite being named characters with families and 18 years of history with your character.

But don't you dare to kill a man that ordered Jonas executed and will do the same to you if you surrender and give him your weapons.
That's straight up EVIL.

 

It also doesn't make any sense that the vault security will attack to kill. The Overseer wants to question you about your dad leaving, so why are the security guards killing the Lone Wanderer (LW)?

What they should have done was using weapons that cause Fatigue and knock out the LW, then (if they do KO the character) the LW would come to in the cell that's in the security room where they are questioning Amata in. Then play the scene with Amata while the character is the cell, then the Overseer would notice the LW had woken up and finish the Amata scene, and starts to interrogate the LW. This could then lead to a situation where the LW has to escape using several different ways (probably using different skills like Speech, Lockpick, Sneak, Science, Repair, etc.)

This would be possible to do with all the systems FO3 already has, it has fatigue damage and it even uses it in the places like when the Enclave KOs the player and takes them into custody. Actually, since they already have the Raven Rock segment, they could just have copied it and implement something similar in Vault 101 (which could play like I just said in this post).

 

You could start with Kendall forcing you into dialogue if he sees you "wanting to take you for questioning". Agreeing would teleport you into interrogation room where you're questioned about James' escape.

Sneaking past Kendall or telling him to fuck off would turn security hostile and use their KO batons to get you for interrogation. Baseball bat and batons could be used to KO a guard.

Killing a guard with BB gun or Amata's pistol (or just hitting them while they're KOd) would cause the guards to swap to lethal weapons.

Depending on how you reached Overseer (obeyed Kendall, got KOd, resisted arrest without killing or killed guards) you would have different outcomes of both Escape and Trouble on the Homefront.

 

Cool idea, but in terms of KO's one of the problems with it is that if you have baseball bats be KO weapons you'd send players the wrong message since that's not a normal effect of the baseball bat once yo leave the vault, and feels more like the silly "knock out" option in stealth videogames where you choke someone for a solid minute until they collapse, and then never wake up. But it's called "knock out" and not kill, so its OK!

I think a better way to do it would have been to optimize the vault for Stealth - side vents, disused portions, locked doors and terminals, set custodian droid haywire to distract security, that sort of thin. This way, the Vault can meet the three minmum characteristics that every Fallout quest should have: the Combat Boy (kill 'em all), Diplomacy Boy (be taken to Overseer), and Stealth Boy (sneak out of the Vault).

You'd probably need to re-write the growing up sequence to make this viable. You'd need to tutorialize Stealth too - possibly you could add a teen section where you're tryin to sneak into the disused portion of the Vault. It'd also be useful if in this sequence you establish Officer Kendall as a real bastard, massive dick, worse than Butch even.