Are Ghouls zombies?

[Languorous_Maiar]

Better example. Mad ghouls from Searchlight. Urgh.

 

[Oppen]

Better example. Mad ghouls from Searchlight. Urgh.

That's a great example of the contradiction. First, they say it's about time. Well, they didn't have a lot of time to become crazy, yet only ONE of all the new ghouls is able to think like a civilized person. Then, you could say it's about getting too much radiation, BUT Gecko's ghouls are comfy and sane inside of a malfunctioning nuclear plant. Fuck the police. Not only that, if you should argue that it's just "low radiation" from the plant, then you could ask why then it's enough to kill people in Vault City, miles away. Oh, well, that citizens are all pussies.

 

[FOvet]

For all intents and purposes, Ghouls are not "zombies", and Feral Ghouls are NOT necessarily canon.

If "canon" is based solely off FO1, maybe. But even then, in Necropolis proper, the "scavengers" are shambling, decaying humans who happen to appear in large packs and attack completely unarmed...

Those weren't the same, however. Even Set explained that they were simply under his orders to scare off anyone from Necropolis (and probably because they had no other useful role, considering their limbs were crippled) and because they LOOKED like zombies, simply standing around and shuffling in place, muttering "Grrr" and "Ungh" and then attacking anyone who wandered near them would sell that the place was really the "City of the Dead".

In saying that "Feral Ghouls" aren't canon, that doesn't imply that a ghoul going crazy and becoming a state that could be referred to as "feral" was not possible. It means that the Bethesda explanation and classification of "Feral Ghouls"- that the NATURAL evolution of becoming a ghoul includes going crazy -is the non-canon BS. Going crazy could happen from any sort of outside stimuli; the stress of your change, the Endless Walk (which I already talked about), personal psychological breakdowns, and so on. But that radiation would somehow cause them to lose it was specified to be IMPOSSIBLE from original Fallout sourcers; since Ghouls were both "immuned to" as well as "seemed comfortable in" radiation. But suddenly Bethesda changed that to "are healed by" and "can be driven crazy by" in FO3.

As far as FEV vs Radiation, this was discussed by a couple of the developers, and some just didn't realize how their lore had evolved to include that SPECIFIC (rare, freak) cases, like Talius and Harold, are that of FEV mutation yielding Ghoul-like results, but that Ghouls themselves were a product of Radiation, exclusively. In many of their design meetings, just like the origins of the Master, the origins of Ghouls went under many revisions, and part of that change was from FEV to Radiation. The lore didn't change, as far as the games were concerned.

FO3 strongly implies that every Ghoul will eventually turn Feral if they keep absorbing radiation.

Actually, they full-on stated it. No implications at all. They DID "imply" that you could only kill them with shots to the head, but as already explained at the start of this discussion, that was just bigoted boogeyman racism.

I actually like Bethesda's take on Ghoul's. I never did like in the early FO how ghouls could just be wandering around THAT heavily irradiated, and the only negative effects being their physical appearance. It just made no sence. The idea that after a time, the ghoul condition effects neurological processes makes a hell of a lot more sense, I think.

That said, despite it being better, FO3 ghouls (and also NV ghouls) don't follow canon. Whether this is a bad thing or not is just as contreversial as the East Coast Enclave, I think.

 

[Knight Captain Kerr]

I didn't think all ghouls became feral. Really the only person I remember saying that was somebody in Tennpenny Tower. Those people said a lot of stupid stuff about ghouls. I mean sure some ghouls become feral, but all of them? Quite a few have been around for over 200 years and they are doing fine.

 

[Ohaimerk]