Fallout 3 vs. Oblivion

[Flop]

Also: How can you say that you already know how radiation works in Fallout? Have you found a radioactive toilet to drink out of in Fo1/2 to test your theory that radioactive water cannot indeed give a +str bonus?

I can't speak for Ranne, but I believe there is a Vault Dveller quote saying "don't drink the glowing water". Also, iirc one of Tycho's survival tips is not to drink from ponds and streams where there's no animal life, since they may be contaminated.

Anyway, I hope this eating-rocks-and-drinking-toilet-water business will only be a minor feature, and not a requirement to stand a decent chance in the game.

 

[BestHopeofHumanity]

Yo. I'm fairly new to NMA, and to Fallout. Bought that value-pack where all the games are on one disc.

Spent January to May beating each game back to back. It was addicting, to say the least.

In any case I've been going around to what forums I can promoting this idea and so far it has been catching on.

I, for one, am not looking forward to the release of Brotherhood of Steel 2. And I can see that none of you are either, and with damned good reason.

 

[terebikun]

...

Uh...topical. If you're going to bash, at least mention why you're bashing it. And then for extra points, make why you're bashing it connected to the actual thread.

 

[Eyenixon]

I'm pretty sure this argument is pointless since all radiation ever did in Fallout was kill you.

 

[Ausir]

And give you extra toes!

 

[Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude]

I'm pretty sure this argument is pointless since all radiation ever did in Fallout was kill you.

It it pointless because however beth decides to implement it, it will become canon with the series.

But as for radiation only killing you, look at the Rad Child / Tough Hide perks in Fallout : Tactics.

 

[Black]

But as for radiation only killing you, look at the Rad Child / Tough Hide perks in Fallout : Tactics.

Fallout : Tactics

Tactics

dam strait
I can find lots of things in Tactics that are just wrong when it comes to Fallout.

It it pointless because however beth decides to implement it, it will become canon with the series.

The fact that even Tactics had more to do with FO canon doesn't help. I won't accept it >

 

[Forhekset]

It it pointless because however beth decides to implement it, it will become canon with the series.

Or we can just try to ignore it, the same way I mostly ignore the fact that the Star Wars prequels exist.

 

[BestHopeofHumanity]

...

Uh...topical. If you're going to bash, at least mention why you're bashing it. And then for extra points, make why you're bashing it connected to the actual thread.

Well where do I begin...
Toilet water
Bobble-heads
Cars with miniature nuclear explosions
Bethesda not showing us a single clip of the game in action, which leads me to believe it's going to be crap.
Gutting the turn-based combat (they could've at least kept CBT from Fallout Tactics) and making the game a "console friendly adventure RPG"
No groin (or eye) shots.
All things to be added on to what the gentlemen giving the review discussed.

This snippet from a fan-interview,
"Actual player goes off and has sex? Not right now, but if a situation called for it, I wouldn’t flinch at adding it with the fade-out. We did that in Daggerfall using the fade out."

There was another game that had sex in it. It was called Fallout 2.
I wonder if Bethesda even knows that. Why the hell should Daggerfall even be mentioned in the process of deciding what is the game? They should've referred to Fallout 1 & 2 for what goes into the 3rd, before furiously stroking their egos by consulting their own games. Themes and characteristics of Bethesda's previous games should have nothing to do with the development of this one.

So again, this game is less than non-canon.
And it's being put out for consoles.
Which is why I refer to it entirely as Brotherhood of Steel 2

 

[Bernard Bumner]

Oh, and to whole this radiation nonsense you're still pushing, just so you know, rapid evolutionary radiation-caused hereditary mutations of complex organisms (i.e. "new species" and such) were commonly believed to be plausible back in the 50s. Mind you, the structure of DNA was only discovered in 1953, so it was a hell of a lot guessing at that point. Using radioactive mutations and anti-radiation pills in the context of "actual scientific assumptions and common mainstream beliefs and fears of the early 50s" is perfectly normal and has absolutely nothing in common with the ridiculous notion of using ionizing radiation as a performance enhancing drug.

The deleterious effects of ionizing radiation were well known about by the 1950s. It really was only pulp fiction authors who thought that ionizing-radiation was a beneficent source of superpowers. By the '50s, the FDA had been clamping down on quack radio- therapies for decades, notably after the wealthy socialite Eben Byers managed to rot his own face off with Radithor pills.

Some of the early pioneering work on the mutagenic effects of ionizing-radiation was carried out in the '20s by Hermann Joseph Muller. Muller won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1946 for this work, and had been vocal about the dangers of ionizing-radiation to human health for some time. Of course, the grimmest confirmation of the effects of radiation on human health was obtained in late 1940s Japan.

The effects of radiation in the Science! of the 1950s was only loosely grounded in science, and came about precisely because of the growing body of research demonstrating the mutagenic effects. There was little belief amongst scientists that sudden catastrophic mutations caused by radiation would be anything other than lethal, and most of the theories of the time concerning speciation suggested that mutation rates must be extremely slow (which isn't actually necessarily the case).

Still, the idea that radiation could embue superpowers was firmly established in pulp fiction through the '50s and '60s - and pretty remains so. In 1957, Lt. Col. Glenn Manning became The Amazing Colossal Man after being exposed to radiation. The Hulk appeared in '62, Radioactive Man '63, Radioactive Roy '64...

The fiction of the '50s is very clear; radiation gives you superpowers.

Still, much of the Science! of Fallout is not drawn from the '50s at all; many of the Holodiscs, for instance, employ large doses of 1990s jargon and pop-science. Getting superpowers from radioactive toilet-water is perfectly plausible in 1950s pulp, but it jars badly against many of the explanations given for the appearance of mutants in the Fallout universe.

 

[whirlingdervish]

I dunno how many times we are going to have to repeat it, but the Virus caused the "beneficial" human mutations.. not the radiation!

The radiation causes horrible sickness and your skin falls off like the ghouls.

The more I think of the "eat radioactive shit for bonuses" idea, the more I realize that in Fallout you'd only get bonuses like an extra toe or radiation poisoning or death for eating something that is obviously radioactive.

I mean, there was already a precedent set here..

If you ate the fruit, or stepped in the goo, the side effects were not beneficial.

If you walked around in the Gecko power plant without protective gear you didn't get stronger.

you got dead.

 

[Bernard Bumner]

I dunno how many times we are going to have to repeat it, but the Virus caused the "beneficial" human mutations.. not the radiation!

The radiation causes horrible sickness and your skin falls off like the ghouls.

Yeah, MCA nails it in the Bible, but remember that Chris Taylor and Tim Cain gave different explanations for the Ghouls. Depending on which source you consider to be authoritative, even Ghouls may not be radiation mutants.

The more I think of the "eat radioactive shit for bonuses" idea, the more I realize that in Fallout you'd only get bonuses like an extra toe or radiation poisoning or death for eating something that is obviously radioactive.

I mean, there was already a precedent set here..

If you ate the fruit, or stepped in the goo, the side effects were not beneficial.

There is something even worse in it, really, and not only because it doesn't necessarily fit with Fallout science. It is another example of unearned stats bonuses - almost arcade-style powerups. There is no good explanation or process by which the boost is earned, other than a notional reference to '50s Science!, and the happy coincidence of drinking water from a piss-pot. It is exactly the same rationale that spawns the flimsy added-content like the Bobble-heads.

Perhaps the only purpose of it is to induce you to actually use the crapper-method of healing, rather than the superior (established) ones? Perhaps it is simply that it might be too much to ask a casual RPG-lite player to do something with negative consequences? Maybe it is meant to boost replay value - ...and I won't stop until I've drunk shit-soup from every toilet in the land...?

If you walked around in the Gecko power plant without protective gear you didn't get stronger.

you got dead.

Well, in this case you're going to have a little stats boost, but also have to balance your consumption of healing bog-juice against the effects of radiation poisoning. So it isn't true to say that this is simply a universally benefitial elixir. It is true to say that it is unecessary, probably contradicts lore, and then leads a ridiculous situation where you have to induce someone to drink stale piss with bonuses to balance its noxious effects.

It wasn't necessarily the most idiotic ideaBethesda developers came up with, but it does seem to be one that they've made unnecessarily complex and integral, when it would have made simply an almost amusing joke as a special encounter.

 

[Ranne]

They could not have possibly known the long-term (say, 50 years and up) biological effects of high-level exposure to nuclear radiation back in the 50s. Hell, they didn't know about the harmful effects of ionizing radiation on human health when Mary Curie died from it in 1934. As far as hereditary genetic mutations go, I think it's safe to say that not that many people even knew the meaning of the word "genetic" back then, let alone everything else. Again, it was all guesswork at that point: most of our actual knowledge about radiation effects comes from long-term studies of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl. No real scientist could accurately predict the rates of hereditary mutations only a year or two after the discovery of the double helix and only five to ten years after the atomic bombings of Japan.

The fiction of the '50s is very clear; radiation gives you superpowers.

Radioactive poisoning as instantaneous superability-granting magic wand? Make it "cheap pulp fiction, comic books and humorous sci-fi of the '50s" and I'm ok with it. I'm pretty sure the mutants of "A Canticle for Leibowitz" didn't fly around spewing webs out of their hands and shooting laser beams out of their a-holes. In fact, with the exception of Henry Kuttner's Hogben family, I don't really recall any notable sci-fi writer who presented radioactive mutants in this manner, and I've read a lot of science fiction of the 50s and 60s in my life.

 

[Bernard Bumner]

I think it's safe to say that not that many people even knew the meaning of the word "genetic" back then, let alone everything else.

Lots of scientists knew what genetic meant. The term genetics was popularized by William Bateson after he rediscovered Mendel's work around 1905, although the term had been in use in a different biological sense from the mid 1800s. Not so, the public. That I'd agree.

Again, it was all guesswork at that point: most of our actual knowledge about radiation effects comes from long-term studies of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl.

The short-term effects of high-dosage exposure were very clear. Some of the longer-term effects of chroinc exposure were known from radiation workers and the victims of radiation therapies. As I said, there was a growing movement, headed by people like Muller, to protect people from the effects of ionizing-radiation.

No real scientist could accurately predict the rates of hereditary mutations only a year or two after the discovery of the double helix and only five to ten years after the atomic bombings of Japan.

Mutation rates are difficult to measure, and even more difficult to predict (this is especially true in the absence of sequencing analysis, or even restriction analysis and chromosomal banding analysis), but there was work in this area even prior to the discovery of the structure of DNA. It isn't necessary to know the structure of DNA, or even that DNA is the carrier of genetic information, in order to measure mutation rates (although it does necessarily mean that either the mutagenic source must be relatively strong or that a very large population must studied, and that generally mutation rates are vastly underaccounted due to silent mutations).

There was some work prior to the '50s on mutation rates, by people like Muller. One of the seminal papers on the matter is Babcock , E.B., and Collins, J.L. (1929) Does Natural Ionizing Radiation Control Rate of Mutation? PNAS, 15 (8), 623-628, which builds on the work of Muller, and also Olsen and Lewis. (Actually, the paper is available for download from the PNAS website, for anybody interested.)

There was limited research into the mutagenic effects of gamma irradiation in the '40s and '50s, e.g. Caspari, E., and Stern, C. (1948) The Influence of Chronic Irradiation with Gamma-Rays at Low Dosages on the Mutation Rate in DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER. Genetics, 33 (1), 75-95., or Ives PT. (1959) The Mutation Rate In Drosophila After High Doses Of Gamma Radiation. PNAS, 45 (2), 188-92.

Radioactive poisoning as instantaneous superability-granting magic wand? Make it "cheap pulp fiction, comic books and humorous sci-fi of the '50s" and I'm ok with it. I'm pretty sure the mutants of "A Canticle for Leibowitz" didn't fly around spewing webs out of their hands and shooting laser beams out of their a-holes. In fact, with the exception of Henry Kuttner's Hogben family, I don't really recall any notable sci-fi writer who presented radioactive mutants in this manner, and I've read a lot of science fiction of the 50s and 60s in my life.

Ah well, there is the difference between real Science Fiction, and fiction about science. No point in referencing authors who really loved and understood science because, as I said, scientists didn't see radiation as a wholly benign force any longer.

The '50s and '60s saw an explosion in pulp fiction (and the second coming of comic strip fiction), so I'm afraid that the worst examples are probably the most numerous. The fiction is very clear, but don't mistake that for me meaning good quality sci-fi. That radiation could achieve almost any transformation imaginable became a cliché which managed to persist well into recent years.