Are Ghouls zombies?

M

Mameluk

It Wandered In From the Wastes
Now that probably every one of you made Nicolas Cage's face, let me begin.
What's exactly the role of Ghouls in Fallout franchise? In theory they're supposed to be the walking rememberence of the nuclear war, ghosts of the old world, people who survived hell and now live in its new form. In practice?
First Ghouls you see in FO1 are that of Necropolis. You barely enter and you get attacked by limping rotting dudes. Then you meet the big boss, Seth, who chills out in his crib called Hall of The Dead.
Okay...
In FO3, to make things worse, they added Feral Ghouls, which is continued in F:NV. They see you, they run to you, they attack you. Near Tenpenny Tower you see the guard call a fellow Ghoul a Zombie. Ouch, racism. I bet if I meet some Ghouls they'll turn up to be cool guys, right?
Wrong.
Most of them live in the Museum of History.
In the Underworld section.
They set up their home on the exposition depicting afterlife.
They are outright creepy. You don't see people twisted by radiation, you see creppy self-proclaimed Zombies, fashioning themselves as corpses who walk the earth because there was no vacancy in Hell.
FO2 portrays Ghouls in some more to earth way, though still making them extraordinary by their lust for radiation (Ghouls praising nuclear reactor's heat in Gecko, anyone?).

My question is: what exactly is the role of Ghouls in Fallout? Were they supposed to be only a graphical element to the franchise or is there something more, but I fail to see it?
I'll tell you what I'd like to see. Something similar to that cult praising a nuclear bomb in Planet of The Apes, which members are disfigured, skinless mutants ("oh gawd that sounds liek ghoolz"). Or an association of Ghoul historians, some organization similar to Followers, teaching history so the Great War never happens and telling stories about life during and after this conflict. Something more ambitious, like the Reservation concept in Van Buren, something that actually makes Ghouls useful as a race. Because so far, at least in my view, they are merely zombies.
 
In the beginning, they were supposed to, essentially, be zombies with more intelligence. They're even referred to as such a few times in FO1, I believe.

They're still very zombie-inspired, but I think they've always been meant to play a greater role than mooks.
 
Well, in FO, it is said that they are people who, for some unknown reason, were changed and not *killed* by radiation. Feral ghouls, at least in theory from several scientiss, are ghoul's who's higher brain functions are damaged, due to effects of radiation on their brains. Technically, they are not zombies, as they are not the living dead--that's TECHNICALLY.

Practically, ferals are no different from zombies, except you can kill em a hell of a lot easier. Contrary to the biggots, you DON'T have to shoot em in the head.

I LOVE the idea of a ghoul historic society. It makes for a very intriguing idea, to poke around the history of ghouls as they struggled for survival after great war.
 
For players who struggled with figuring out the puzzle of Where's the Water Chip in FO1 and barely made it in time before the timer ran out, and ended up in the Necropolis AFTER the Invasion, Ghouls really represented nothing BUT zombies. Because of all the convoluted hidden timers, many aspects of FO1 went unnoticed, by many players, and Ghouls never really had their "time in the sun" to be truly fleshed out (no pun intended) as characters/humans.

FO2 changed that, when, no matter how long you took, it introduced a Ghoul city that was oppressed/terrorized by its bigoted, xenophobic neighbors. Another community that included Ghouls and humans and mutants, because "we're all human on the inside". Then another community that lets anyone live within its borders, regardless of their race, so long as they abide by their law (and didn't take such a proactive stance toward "recruiting" like the second). You finally saw Ghouls as human beings, and you realized that's all they were.

That's what Ghouls were meant to represent. The only hostile Ghouls you'd encounter were aggressive scavengers, and there were plenty of human encounters of the same variety, so there was clearly no difference. Ghouls were Fallout's answer to modern day racism, in the fictional, radioactive post-apocalyptic, retro future universe of Fallout.

Even your wish of seeing a nuke-worshiping Ghoul cult was also already touched on in FOT. One of the missions involved protecting a town of Ghouls that congregated around and worshiped an undetonated nuclear warhead, and formed a very bizarre religion around it. Of course you were there to TAKE the warhead, which required some behind-the-scenes diplomacy, but the little community that the mission established and its long-standing presence BEFORE your arrival can't just be ignored.

Ghouls as zombies really just was a product of Bethesda. They needed mass-producible, generic enemies to litter their dungeon crawls, and the Treyarch Call of Duty games and various other titles with similar Horde Mode gameplay seemed to prove that "Everybody loves zombies!" so they just created Feral Ghouls to suit their purposes. Even their Van Buren counterparts weren't regular Ghouls, they were Ghouls who were humiliated, stripped of all their belongings (even clothes) and sent on a harsh exile with the sole intention of dying from starvation/dehydration. Instead those that survived simply became crazed and irrational cannibals. But "going feral" as a natural stage of all Ghouls? Purely a Bethesda fairytale... FO2 and the FO Bible clearly illustrated that taking a Ghoul and exposing them to MORE radiation just yields you a Glowing Ghoul, nothing more. It's just unfortunate that Obsidian more or less contractually had to acknowledge that "this is now a thing" in their follow-up title, and that they couldn't legally discredit it as nonsense.

For all intents and purposes, Ghouls are not "zombies", and Feral Ghouls are NOT necessarily canon.
 
I always thought the ghouls were humans with radiation poisoning being affected by FEV, or maybe even radiation-tainted FEV. To say they are based on zombies makes no sense as fallout is a 1950s style theme and zombies are very much late 60s and 70s
 
I know I came dangerously close on my very first playthrough. I got back to Vault 13 with quite literally hours to spare... XD
 
I have never even came clsoe to running out of time, in neither of my 3 runs. It would seem like you would have to completely ignore the Quest for waaaaaay too much time.
 
In my first game I actually found Necropolis and chip, but haven't enough time for back to Vault 13. I was very frustrated. :cry:

Then rage and install Fallout 2.
 
SnapSlav said:
For all intents and purposes, Ghouls are not "zombies", and Feral Ghouls are NOT necessarily canon.
Click to expand...

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...
 
Canon changed over time when it comes to Ghouls.
In original concept Ghouls are only those created from Vault 12, affected by FEV + radiation, and there was no more than 1k ghouls in Core Region and whole world.
Later Fallout: Tactics and Fallout: BOS changed this to only radiation and ghouls occurrence in all world.
Then Bethesta did a step more with creating feral ghouls.
What next? ;)
 
Feral Ghouls are just malnourished and crazed Ghouls. Van Buren was gonna have the Endless Walkers too, wich are basicaly Feral Ghouls.
 
Languorous_Maiar said:
Canon changed over time when it comes to Ghouls.
In original concept Ghouls are only those created from Vault 12, affected by FEV + radiation, and there was no more than 1k ghouls in Core Region and whole world.
Later Fallout: Tactics and Fallout: BOS changed this to only radiation and ghouls occurrence in all world.
Then Bethesta did a step more with creating feral ghouls.
What next? ;)
Click to expand...
IIRC, Fallout's bible states it was indeed caused by the FEV in all the cases, by a broken container which ended up filling the atmosphere with the virus, thus affecting more people.

SealyStar said:
SnapSlav said:
For all intents and purposes, Ghouls are not "zombies", and Feral Ghouls are NOT necessarily canon.
Click to expand...

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...
Click to expand...
Do you know of any non-Resident Evil zombies who have a leader? Because they seem to be under orders of Seth, or at least that's what he implies. Also, the whole grunting thing and so seems to be acting, again, according to Seth.
 
Walpknut said:
Feral Ghouls are just malnourished and crazed Ghouls. Van Buren was gonna have the Endless Walkers too, wich are basicaly Feral Ghouls.
Click to expand...

Feral Ghouls existed in Fallout 1 and 2 as well, they just weren't called that. They were there, though-- mindless, crazed ghouls that had little or no capacity for speech, wouldn't engage in dialogue, and would attack you on sight. They were fast (high AP-- remember how obscenely far some of those things would shuffle during a turn?) and they tended to attack in groups, unarmed. They fit the bill in just about every way.
 
SealyStar said:
SnapSlav said:
For all intents and purposes, Ghouls are not "zombies", and Feral Ghouls are NOT necessarily canon.
Click to expand...

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...
Click to expand...
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.

Stanislao Moulinsky said:
FO3 strongly implies that every Ghoul will eventually turn Feral if they keep absorbing radiation.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Feral ghouls are similar to zombies. Both expirience loss of cognitive functions, make nasty vocal sounds, and are very hungry for PC Hero's
flesh.
Ordinary ghouls are on the path of mental degradation to the level of feral ghouls. Its only the matter of time till a sane ghould turns feral.
Its explained somewhere in Fallout: New Vegas.
 
TucoX said:
Feral ghouls are similar to zombies. Both expirience loss of cognitive functions, make nasty vocal sounds, and are very hungry for PC Hero's
flesh.
Ordinary ghouls are on the path of mental degradation to the level of feral ghouls. Its only the matter of time till a sane ghould turns feral.
Its explained somewhere in Fallout: New Vegas.
Click to expand...
Yes, that's why it's messed up. That happens since F3.
You take the 200 years old ghouls from Vault 12, and you get mostly sane ghouls. Or at least, capable of talking, which is far more than feral ghouls from F3 and F:NV can do in terms of being rational people.
You take 30 years old ghouls, being ghouls since a month or so, and get mad SOB's. That makes perfect sense :roll:
It's not like an explanation was given. At least, not one which doesn't contradict previous statements, or simple logic.
 
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