Fallout Essentials

00:49

00:49

First time out of the vault
Hi,
Lots of people here have been listing their wishes for Fallout 4 and those threads made for an interesting reading, but there was one thing that caught my eye: suggestions like “Fallout: New Cairo”, weather patterns, etc. In my opinion they could make a potential Fallout 4 more enjoyable but I was immediately reminded of something I’d rather forget: there were vampires, androids and aliens in Fallout 3 *shudders*. They aren’t horrible ideas, but in a Fallout game? Come on! So, even though post-apocalyptic London with varied weather patterns sounds cool, is it really Fallout? Would one actually play that like a game of this epic franchise?

That’s how I got curious: what is it that defines Fallout to You? What plot tropes, background events, colour schemes, gameplay world scales, etc. you think are essential in a Fallout?

Also, if you played FO and FO2, how did these things survive a transition from an isometric 2d to a first-person 3d, from Black Isle to Bethesda/Obsidian? How would you have them handle it?

As an example:

1. Fallout is based on 50’s pulp science!

There was no computer in the original Fallouts that was smaller than a kitchen oven; the world of Fallout is what would have happened if humanity had made advances in nuclear science and biology after WWII instead of electronics. This is what defines Fallout to me, and it’s more than the “Domestic Goddess” hairdo, a Pre-War Parkstroller Outfit and retro-futuristic furnishings in old houses – it extends to plot, goddammit. I think that was completely forgotten in Fallout 3, and NV went for a more western approach, which didn’t work for me personally. I'd have the producers stop looking for pirate-zombie-ninja-alien ideas and concentrate on this setting.

2. Epic dungeon crawls: character and experience

Remember Sierra Army Depot? That underground base that had its own character, history, and things going on and having gone on as and before you enter? That Mentat-overdosed alien-like skeleton? How depending on your skillset your adventure (and Skynet’s state of mind) here could be quite different? I missed that. There was honestly no memorable ‘dungeon crawl’ in FO3, except maybe for Our Lady of Hope Hospital/Statesman Hotel (which had a good vibe to it but offered little diversity in different skillset playthrough experience). Some places come close to that in F:NV though, like Vault 22. Now, I know that “boo-hoo Fallout is an FPS now and you can’t play it without a gun”, but I honestly can’t see any reason why different skill sets offering a different and in each case valid path to your destination isn’t plausible at least in these dungeon crawls, even if rest of the world is hopeless in this regard. I would honestly rather see less 'dungeon' areas (or have them smaller, like bunkers) but have them bigger and able to have the PC able to approach them differently.
Also, I am of the opinion that in a game series, a sequel should at least try to better things that were lacking in the game before that, and in my eyes Fallout was all about different characters approaching the situation differently.
Alas, Fallout the FPS.

There are a couple more things, but I was wondering what you thought about it? What defines Fallout in your eyes?
 
There's lots of things, but one thing I enjoyed with FO1 and 2 (as well as many other older games) is a certain player-unfriendlyness - the certainty that if you screw up, there are real reprecussions.
I remember finding out in FO3 that it was possible to simply pay your drug/alcohol addiction away with money. Not even lots of money, but a little money. Stuff like that really dissapoint me.
 
I would hardly describe the Sierra Army base or the other dungeons as "epic dungeon crawlers" - rather the opposite since most of them were pretty boring safe for maybe the Glow.

What defined Fallout as a game for me was the superb atmosphere, music/sfx/visuals mixed together and my beloved isometric perspective.

What I found very nice regarding the world was that it felt very cold, brutal and melancholic. Unfortunately Fallout 2 already broke with this.
 
Aside from the great roleplaying experience? The ambient tracks. The post-apocalyptic setting. The death animations.

This is why I'm too excited for Wasteland 2. It has all these things... and even more.
 
Sub-Human said:
Aside from the great roleplaying experience? The ambient tracks. The post-apocalyptic setting. The death animations.

This is why I'm too excited for Wasteland 2. It has all these things... and even more.
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Not just ambient - by rushing in and out of maps, I often neglected to listen through many of the background tracks, but theres a whole range of genres mixed together there. Many of the tracks are quite rythmical (and awesome) such as Vault City's track, not to mention The Den and Raiders
 
Very good points, OP, and I'd be interested to hear what else you had in mind. Although I considered your first point MUCH more valid than the second, still, both were quite solid.

What I felt was ESSENTIAL to Fallout was something intangible that couldn't be quantified (and thus made it easier to lose as time and development teams moved further away).

1. Fallout's "heart".

Part of that was utilizing every possible resource to convey, with unity, the same depressing sensation of the world around them to every player. The music was instrumental in this; The Glow would have never been the same without the haunting music making you look over your own shoulder, even though you KNEW you were perfectly fine, and there was no "shoulder" to look over within the game. The aesthetics had a precision to them that worked with the ambient music to help sell this feeling of the setting. There was enough detritus combined with enough "cleaned", livable spaces that you felt that these places were very real. The juxtaposition of the aloof comedy in the HUD/UI/Menu/background with the harsh, violent, gritty Wasteland also worked together with everything else to sell the same feeling, cohesively.

By FO2 this was already somewhat lacking, but it was still good. FO3 had none of this, although what it did have was an obvious (and shallow) attempt at recreating it- it simply failed at its attempt, that's all. FONV was somewhat closer to the original "heart" of Fallout when it reused the original soundtracks to complement the places that needed it, but it wasn't QUITE as atmospheric and believable, as the original, yet still very good.

But I'd focus on this:
00:49 said:
Also, if you played FO and FO2, how did these things survive a transition from an isometric 2d to a first-person 3d, from Black Isle to Bethesda/Obsidian? How would you have them handle it?
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As I pointed out above, they DIDN'T survive the transition, but not strictly because of the shift in genre. The engines had more to do with killing the atmosphere of the franchise than the shift from isometric to first person. For example, ALL the games had "obscenely gory death animations", but the animations in the modern games were largely the result of the ridiculousness of rag doll physics, as opposed to the pre-rendered animations of the originals. You got a laugh out of the new ones because they were silly, but you got a laugh from the originals for a very different reason: they weren't silly, they were satisfying, in a rather dark way. The same problem plagued the modern games' abilities to allow players to RP any kind of character that could approach a situation in "any" way. The older games were built around an engine that was made FOR the express purpose of allowing you to do whatever you wanted, meanwhile the modern games were built around an engine that focused on FPS gameplay. The balance of all the creatures and encounters were tailored to the assumption that players would approach every encounter from a first person shooter mindset. There was no room for players to feel stressful or nervous about being "chased", because the default response was "line up crosshairs, kill, move on".

How would I have had them handle it? Well, for starters, I would've given Obsidian the freedom to use their OWN engine, rather than force them to use the same fault-ridden one. If I had to have more control over the specifics, I'd honestly rather a third-person based perspective, simply because it's a different KIND of immersion, and one that stays more true to the "heart" of the originals than the violent change to first person. For a time, while I was playing Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, I fantasized about the modern Fallout titles working like DS and DkS. The combat mechanics were fluid, the overall graphics, character, and environments were impressive, and you believed every NPC was real even though they had no facial animations. The contrast between fine detail in areas where players would focus on it (combat, environment, etc) and lack of detail in bringing characters to life worked perfectly so that the games drew players in, yet it didn't force all the details on them and allowed their imagination to fill in the gaps where most appropriate. The end result was an amazing degree of believability to the world you were playing in. What if the modern Fallout games had the solid combat of the Souls series, with the SPECIAL system instead of the Souls-based stats system, and full-branching dialog trees in place of "Yes or No" text boxes? I love to think about that, because in many ways I feel as if they would have been far superior overall.
 
1. Quest based RPG
2. various ways to solve single quest( no need to all the quest)
3. various endings
4. name is fallout?
5. guns!
6. bramin
7. no beth, no todd
8. most important, Post apocalypse or after PA
9. occurs in fallout world
 
1. An immersive, pervasive world and story that reacts to the decisions a player makes.

What I always felt was essential to what made Fallout great was that it would react to the amount and type of effort that you put into it.

No matter how you decided your character would be, the game was generally designed well enough to accommodate every kind of play-style. One of the best accomplishments in Fallout 1 and 2 was getting through the entire game without firing a single shot or killing anyone directly.

Combat is an option, it should not be forced. Sneaking, running away, etc. So the idea that "epic dungeons" is a necessity in Fallout is false.

Many modern gamers overuse the word "immersion" to describe aesthetics such as music or graphics, not remembering that those things will become dated fast. But the complex interweaving of ideas and the characters is what really drove home the poignancy of Fallout's atmosphere and immersed you into the world.

Music enhances the mood, graphics enhance the visualization of the story being told, but neither of those are as immersive as the feeling that your decisions matter, and there is an obvious and meaningful consequence to anything that you do.

2. A melting pot of ideas that comes to a head. Grey and gray morality with the 1950s-style theme as a bit of a compass to give bearing.

There are so many themes in Fallout that it would be hard to really pin one down as an "essential" theme, which is really what what made Fallout. The 1950s-esque Pre-War America is depicted as a land of apple pie and flag-waving americana, and when applied against the desolation and chaos of the Post-Apocalypse, you get the drama from the story as the realities of the hard life become all the more clear.

The stylings of the 1950s is an ideal of what once was, and then you deconstruct that. Some characters view it as a mistake, some characters view it as an example, others view it as an opportunity. The 1950s-esque ideals and technology provide a compass and backdrop for the viewer, and the story is more or less the playing out of the conflict of the reality of the universe setting in.

On the other hand, the 50s-esque mood is what makes foreign Fallouts a hard sell.
 
DevilTakeMe said:
1. An immersive, pervasive world and story that reacts to the decisions a player makes.

What I always felt was essential to what made Fallout great was that it would react to the amount and type of effort that you put into it.

No matter how you decided your character would be, the game was generally designed well enough to accommodate every kind of play-style. One of the best accomplishments in Fallout 1 and 2 was getting through the entire game without firing a single shot or killing anyone directly.

Combat is an option, it should not be forced. Sneaking, running away, etc. So the idea that "epic dungeons" is a necessity in Fallout is false.

Many modern gamers overuse the word "immersion" to describe aesthetics such as music or graphics, not remembering that those things will become dated fast. But the complex interweaving of ideas and the characters is what really drove home the poignancy of Fallout's atmosphere and immersed you into the world.

Music enhances the mood, graphics enhance the visualization of the story being told, but neither of those are as immersive as the feeling that your decisions matter, and there is an obvious and meaningful consequence to anything that you do.
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I can't agree more.


I don't think fallout series are dungeon or combat based rpg since we can avoid combats but can't ignore quest and world of fallout.
fo3 can be denied to be true fallout because it is dungeon based rpg, world is awful and quest can be ignored( many of players who enjoys fo3 said " just ignore main quest and explore" not just I hate fo3). subquest seems good but problem is there no world involved to quest. Thats why I don't think fo3 is fallout

NV is not dungeon based rpg if it was, it would be terrible game :lol: but it is quest based game and the quests are involved in the world not like fo3 but like 1,2 . some of you think it isn't fallout but in my opinion NV is much similar to fallout than fo3 , POS, FOT(although compare with rules and interface, FOT is much similar with fallout though)
I haven't played POS nor FOT, but I heard FOT isn't quest based rpg but it is combat based rpg. It makes me confused although POS is definitely not fallout though :lol:
 
That reminds me about a conversation I had with another user about FOBOS (horrible though it is, I still won't deride is as "POS") and one of my many points about its onslaught of failings. So I'll add this to my "list" (and edit my first post to HAVE portions of a list)...

2. Non-linearity.

Every TRUE Fallout game didn't force the player to engage in the story (or lack thereof) in a specific series of events. Even IF players decided to traverse the Wasteland for the first time as the Vault Dweller in the "canonical sequence of events", they still had a choice as to how they would approach this. Did you kill the Master before taking out the Vats? Did you ignore the desperate search for a water chip while you focused on the Mutant threat? Did you visit specific towns "chronologically" until you acquired the Water Chip, then return to your Vault, then venture back out and do more exploring until you found and disabled the vats, then back out some more until you uncovered the Master's lair and killed him? ANY direction of taking the story was possible, and it was up to the player's discretion in what direction they wanted to take it.

Due to the difference in structuring of the quests and plot, FO2 was less non-linear than its predecessor, but only by so much. Conversely, even with the "many" side quests present in FO3, you couldn't complete the story however you saw fit. You HAD to first locate your father, then help with the project, then escape, then this, then that, then etc etc... It was all laid out before you in trail of bread crumbs in a set-in-stone manner, and just didn't allow for the same level of freedom as classic Fallout. New Vegas was a bit further down the road of linearity than FO2, but MUCH more non-linear than FO3, as it provided "checklist" objectives for the player to address however they saw fit, and letting players decide the ultimate course of the story rather than follow a single set plot. Of course FOT was almost strictly linear (with a handful of occasions that players could play one mission before the other which, like Starcraft II, is HARDLY any "non-linear experience" to behold) and FOBOS was ABSOLUTE in its linearity. While they weren't the only reasons those titles suffered, they certainly contributed to their poor reception.
 
Okay, I screwed up while delivering my second point in the OP so let me try and rectify.

If I am role-playing a Good-Natured Courier with tags on Science, Repair and Medicine I would want to stay away from that Fiend-infested factory that holds loot that could prove useful in the application of my skills. So an Old-World location that I would be able to access should have some way for me to try and explore it with my particular skillset, and what attracted me in FO2 about it (and why I mentioned it) was SAD, where there was a special something hidden away for a scientist character - the ultimate version of Skynet companion.

When you discover a sizable Pre-War installation in FO1&2 it is something special because of the scarcity of such places and because a character with certain stats could get something special out of it. Again, SAD was not the glowing epic example of this, but it was a step in the right direction.

I feel that in FO3 without this all of the Pre-War locations are basically made as a place designed solely for offensive characters and that isn't fair. Again, FO:NV was a step ahead again because as a weak little scientist I could still have some way to enter and gain profit from ruins like REPCONN HQ (for the most part). Basically this crosses over into different experiences territory: I want such areas to be unique, have their own interesting story, and I want my visit there with a different character actually be different than my previous visits (and I imagine that in order to do that the designers would have to make these places larger and more complex at the cost of making them fewer and far in-between - fine with me).

Also,

3. Vast Wasteland
In FO1, FO2 and FOT the Wasteland was a big place that took in-game days to travel. Even if it's a map where date numbers change as the pointer slowly moves through the map, it added a lot to the feeling of devastation. In 3 and Vegas things seemed a little bit cramped to me but seeing as the series is now 3d and constructive a map that would be big enough to be desolate would take forever and such a gameworld would be dull to explore I really see no way this can be remedied.
Is it just me? And if not, what do you think would cause a similar effect in a 3d Fallout?
 
00:49 said:
3. Vast Wasteland
In FO1, FO2 and FOT the Wasteland was a big place that took in-game days to travel. Even if it's a map where date numbers change as the pointer slowly moves through the map, it added a lot to the feeling of devastation. In 3 and Vegas things seemed a little bit cramped to me but seeing as the series is now 3d and constructive a map that would be big enough to be desolate would take forever and such a gameworld would be dull to explore I really see no way this can be remedied.
Is it just me? And if not, what do you think would cause a similar effect in a 3d Fallout?
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I think this is easily remedied, just by LITERALLY remaking it. You could effectively look at the classic FO map as a "Hub System", where the map is the central hub and reaching each green circle is a slightly more drawn out, interactive way of "opening a door".

How could this work in modern games? Well, take Dead Space, for example, a game where the gigantic USG Ishimura was the setting for the majority of the game. Each level took place on particular segments of the ship, interconnected via a tram system that spanned the whole ship. Every level was completed by getting back on the tram, and the next level began with you stepping off. Any level could potentially occupy hours of your time, and you knew that the fade in/out of shifting levels represented some amount of time traveling across the mammoth vessel.

Dead Space came out in 2008, and it was critically acclaimed for many of its design choices, among them its hub system. It isn't "going backwards" to implement such a system; Bethesda simply wanted the "seamless world" model and opted to make the worlds smaller rather than put up any illusions that it was larger than it seemed. Again, you could draw further examples from games like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls in this regard. Demon's Souls had a hub system, and every main area was "seamless", so it was somewhat of a hybrid, and the end result was a feeling that you were IN a massive world, with each area feeling genuinely gargantuan. Dark Souls went totally "seamless", and utilized many tricks to make the world seem bigger than it actually was. Sometimes all it takes is a wall, but again, Bethesda opted for that wide, open, flat wasteland. It's why the Capitol Wasteland felt so small yet any random shack you entered felt so big; you can't see beyond the walls.

It's quite easy to recreate the "Vast Wasteland" feel; it simply hasn't been done.
 
@SnapSlav: I've never played the games you mentioned, and the idea of a Hub system always seemed to me like something of an illusion that really wouldn't work: for example, random encounters taking place on a world map in a plain stretch of desert is what made me believe that there actually was a wasteland in between the towns in Fallout.

Then again, I've never played these games, so I guess I'll take your word for it :)
 
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