Can someone tell me where are all these so called consequences in Fallout 1?

W

Weaver

First time out of the vault
Everyone keeps boasting about how the whole Fallout 1 world in interconnected and everything has long-reaching consequences.

Well here is how it goes:

- Found Shady Sands:
"Greetings stranger, welcome to our town. Can you please save us from the radscorpions?". Say "no", nothing happens. Say "yes" and kill radscorpions. Consequnce: "Oh thank you traveling stranger" +XP. Just a "thank you" from one or two persons. Then they default to their previous dialogue dispenser forms.
"Oh my daughter has been kidnapped, can you please save her?" Say "no", nothing happens. Say "yes", go to raider camp and save daughter. "Oh thank you traveling stranger" from father and daughter. +XP. Then they default to their previous dialogue dispenser forms.

- Raider Camp: The one we visited to save the damsel in distress.
"Kill these two women for me". Say "no" he kills you or you kill him. Say "yes" and kill the two women. Consequence: "good job, now get out". +XP. You join their clan, and it's absolutely meaningless.

- Junktown:
"Evil greedy Casino man is evil, please help up get him". Help them get him. Consequence: "oh thank you traveling stranger". +XP. Or help the evil Casino man. Consequence: "Good job, now get out". +XP.


It's just adventuring from one town to the next. These locations are not interconnected, they are isolated, and have static quest dispensers that wait for you to come help them then give you nothing but caps and a "thank you". There is neither consequences in what you do in one location over another location, nor any impressive consequences for choosing whichever 2 or 3 ways the game lets you finish a quest. And frankly, Fallout 3 choices felt like they had more consequences than this game, like blowing up Megaton from tenpenny tower literally turned the town to ruins, or helping the ghouls genocide the snobs and take over the hotel changed the entire hotel and its inhabitants and the dialogues.
 
Fallout 3 doesn't have slideshows at the end that show the fate of the towns, depending of your actions.
Sure, you only see the consequences for decades, not much longer.

Depending of who you helps (Gizmo/Killian) in Junktown, he will be in charge of the town. Plus, you may not be able to recruit Tycho, depending to what you do.

If you mess if super-mutants in Necropolis, they will kill the ghouls later.

If you help the followers of the apocalypse or the BOS, they will help you invade the unity strongholds.

If you mess with any faction, they won't forgive you if you sleep 3 days in front of the town doors. (by messing with them, it would not only involve attacking them)

If you eliminate deathclaws at one place, you may not meet them in another place.

If your karma is low, you may be able to kill Jacoren.

Necropolis is linked with Mariposa/Cathedral, because of the Unity.
Many people in other cities fear Necropolis ghouls.
In the hub, you have people related to the unity, the Brotherhood of steel and the master origins.
In adytum you have many links with the Cathedral.

But i agree that those are very tiny compared to Fallout 2.
 
Slideshows that play at the end of the game? Seriously? That's the "consequences" everyone has been talking about?
Fallout 3 at least has three dog who keeps mentioning the choices you make and their consequences. Also, doesn't Fallout 3 have ending slideshows except without a one-line audiolog?
 
I thought 3dogs was praising unconfident players ego. Does he elaborates about future develloppement of settlements after your actions ?
 
Yes he does. For example you leave the kid in graydich, and he complains how there's a kid left all alone, someone should go pick him up. If you strike a deal between Arefu and the vampires, he comments that there's now peace between the two. Everything he says about you is about the results of your choices.
And I'm still scratching my head about the slideshows thing, I'm baffled how this is what everyone meant by "consequences".
 
We misunderstodd each other about one point.

I meant develloppments of settlements.

I tend to think that Fo2 tend to do a far better job about the consequences and link between cities, but here we compare Fo1 & Fo3.

In Fo1, you take, for instance Shady Sands :
In you failed to beat the raiders, don't beat mutant quickly enough, or manage to kill Tandi & Aradesh by yourself, the city collapse crushed by mutants or raiders.
If Tandi dies, but Aradesh survives, he will manage to lead the town for a few years, before being killed by raiders. So the city collapse, but later.
If Aradesh dies, but Tandi survives, she will manage to lead the town for many years and devellop it into a prosperous city.
If both Tandi & Aradesh survive, the city would not only increase but they would also spread influence to the rest of the area and form the New Californian Republic. (that still exist by the Time of Fallout New Vegas)

So there, you not only have various factors that are taken into account. Some are obvious (you must save Tandi), other aren't (manage to finish the game in 230 days). All of these factors alter the end of the game. That part of the ending have 5 possible outcomes. Most of these outcome not only deal with the immediate effect, but also about long term consequences. (NCR would only reappear on the plot 80 years later) And there are many other part on the ending.

On the other hand, 3dogs, as an ingame character, can't tell us anything about the future and deal only with the immediate effect of your action. He mainly introduces issue to the player, praise him if he solve the issue, blame him if he failed, or tell that there is still work to do if he hasn't. He is more like a voiced quest marker. He could be a part of the pipboy AI.

About the ending of Fo3, it only deal with the water purifier, and your karma, not much about what happens during the following years. Then you need Broken steel to have some consequences about things you had to do to end the game (enable the water purifier, beat the enclave) and not much about things you chose to (contaminate the water purifier, (there is no immediate effect) kill or not Eden (Libery Prime will kill him anyway))

In Fo3, nobody seem to care about what you are doing, except about things that you have no choice but to do. Even killing most citizens of a town will be forgiven after 3 days.

Try to mess with BOS in Fo1 and you will be sure to never access their bunker again.
 
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Showing a few slides after the game ends isn't "consequences". What I thought was every choice you make, or at least some of them, changed the game as you're playing it. As far as this aspect is concerned, Fallout 3 does a better job than Fallout 1.
Also, is there a rule that says there should be a minimum time span after the ending, like 10 years, so these supposed "consequences" are valid?
 
I though you were talking about long term consequences. If you don't, then it was no need for me to explain those.

But on the other hand, Fallout 3 sure also provide things that have short term consequences. I recall a few of them.
 
I've got to respectfully disagree with you, Weaver. In Fallout 1, even if there are few situations where what you do in one place will affect another, choice and consequence is built into the very fabric of the game at a fundamental level (especially as opposed to Fallout 3, but I'll only be drawing that comparison because it's increasingly seemed to be your intent to make it yourself). This owes to three main factors:

1. Character Building. It's sort of a series tradition that an experienced player will always eventually be able to build a super-generalist that can do almost everything in one playthrough. In Fallout 3, though, this is a foregone conclusion that happens early on and almost by accident. The first game not only makes it harder to advance in level, but gives you perks less frequently, makes skill/stat-boosting methods much rarer and more expensive (no magic clothes, pricey skill books and chems, higher consequences for withdrawal/addiction) and actually gives more skills in-world/in-conversation application. In Shady Sands alone, there are three or four places where the skills your character has (or doesn't) will bar them from completing quests, at least until you have time to swing back through. Given the in-game timer, the existence of an actual difficulty progression, and the very real possibility of failure in most endeavors (more on that one later), your character's capabilities (and weaknesses) at any given moment and the order you can (or choose to) tackle things in take on a greater relevance to gameplay than in F3.

2. Combat (or the evasion thereof). Again, it's a given that eventually you'll be an untouchable death machine. Where Fallout differs from 3 in this regard is that in the latter, level scaling, twitch factor, and Gamebryo's relative incapability to handle large numbers of NPCs at once mean that almost any character can run around like a squirrel on meth and be a viable threat right out of the vault. You can easily pick up a Sniper Rifle and a Flamer in your very first combat encounter, and there are people here who have beaten the entire game with a 10mm pistol. I killed the first F3 supermutie I ever met with a Louisville Slugger before level 10. In Fallout 1, on the other hand, for most of the game, large-scale combat can be an actual deterrent to certain characters. It's far more risky, far more deadly, and, consequently, there are actual paths built into the game that don't just assume that you're eventually going to end up killing everything you're not friends with. The choices you make in building your character can have an actual bearing on how you play and on which paths are feasibly possible for you to complete. Some of this is subjective, of course, but the stealth/infiltration and speech pathways in Fallout "feel" quite different than the ones in F3 and are far better fleshed-out; for the most part, they're not just obvious shortcuts around combat.

3. Complexity. "Choice" isn't always something as obvious as either/or-- It's in the totality of how you've played. It can mean where you've been, what you've said, who and what you know. Dialogue trees in Fallout are sometimes guilty of providing the illusion of complexity only to have all (or most) branches lead back to the same place, but that's the exception rather than the rule. There are many, many pathways that open or close to you depending on how you've conducted yourself with the person you're talking to or things you've done and seen elsewhere (not the least of which is an entire endgame scenario), and far more dialogues with real, exclusive branches than F3 can boast. There are far more situations than in Fallout 3 (possibly even NV) where you only get one chance to pass or fail, both in and out of dialogue, and more places where failure can actually mean you lose an opportunity or change a condition for good, something that seems to be anathema to Bethesda's design philosophy.

I could expound on this, but I'd risk crossing the threshold from "tedious" into "unreadable." The short of it is that a plurality of the conversations you have in the game, every skill point you spend, and almost everything you do (all the way down to what you're wearing and whether you have your weapon out at the wrong time) can change the game as you play it in Fallout 1, providing for noticeably distinct experiences from one character to another. Compare this to Fallout 3, where the main differences in playthroughs, quite literally, boil down to who you kill and how.
 
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naossano said:
I thought 3dogs was praising unconfident players ego. Does he elaborates about future development of settlements after your actions ?
Click to expand...

If anything you would think the radio reports Three Dog does about you would affect how people of other settlements would react when they realize who you are.

If you for example decided to blow up Megaton and then later visit Rivet City where the locals suddenly realize who you are.
Rivet City law official/mayor "Wait a minute!? You're that bastard who decided to nuke Megaton, Three Dog warned us all about you. Get out of here before we decide to open fire on you, you soulless monster!"

Big Town locals "We don't want any help from you, we rather face the Super Mutants on our own than make a deal with a mass murderer."

Underworld locals "Well well, if it isn't the guy/gal who goes around detonating unexploded nuclear warheads. Decided that the world wasn't a shithole already since the Great War, did yah? Had hoped your type had gone the way of the dodo when the old world did. Now get out."
 
Fallout 1 gives both short terms and long terms consequences while Fallout 3 gives some short term consequences while the Purifier being only the long one. For example I help Shady Sands with the raiders and scorpions, my short term consequences is the thank you routine and karma but in the ending it shows me that my actions helped creating the NCR ( there is even a vault dweller statue in the NCR in FO2) while if I blow up Megaton my only consequences is the ruins,karma,one random encounter and let's not mention Moira, there is no long term consequences from it ( like the local wildlife mutated even more or people discovered not to let a stranger thinker with a bomb) and even if you defuse the bomb the house is the only consequence( I thinked the The Church would went nuts if I deactivated it). There is no long term consequence, Megaton doesn't expand/etc it simply stays put.

While quests/cities connecting/leading to each other thing, you only ''see clearly'' by Junktown/Hub/Necropolis, in Shandy Sands only Ian points out another city. This is better handled in FO2,like the Vault City questline.
 
I don't really understand how the pointless DJ prattle in Fallout 3 at all even had any effect on the game world as though yes it was reported that some random stranger from a Vault did so and such, it really has absolutely no impact on the entire game as a whole. So you blow up Megaton...well other than the rather striking visual of watching a city reduced to a crater and gaining the favor of your new "British"(Tenpenny had an awful accent...that sounded like something out of bad cinema from the 30's portraying life in the colonies perhaps) landlord who by all means other than giving you a room fully ignores you afterwards.

Pretty much your actions in Fallout 3 had absolutely no consequences whatsoever and furthermore the omniscient narrator in the form of Three Dog was a more of a simple pat on the back telling the character what a great job that he did, or vilifying his deeds, which at the end of the day really detracts from the whole premise of Fallout being a gray open-world experience where the player is not constrained by morality, however the choices he makes are made aware by others who either reward or punish him appropriately.

Finally at the end of the day, you can in all practicality kill or disable all the members of the Brotherhood of Steel during the rather silly giant robot scene and yet you'll still be taken to the exact same eventual conclusion whereby you're forced into dealing with the water purification problem...which in actually a good Fallout game would have given you the option to murder the BOS rep with you in the room, and say to hell with humanity, this isn't my project and let the purifier be blown straight to hell(in a good Fallout game that is....).
 
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