Ok, doubt anyone will read this, but I’ll give a quick rundown of my fallout journey.
Back around 2006 or so I was 11 or 12 and would spend a lot of time “Wikipedia surfing” reading about books, movies, or video games that I figured I would never end up reading/watching/playing. I was always really into sci-fi, I think I started with an article on Star Wars, but eventually I came across post apocalyptic fiction. After reading about mad max and a boy and his dog, I somehow stumbled upon fallout. The fact that it was a video game made me even more interested, so I starting getting into the lore, and was fascinated by the idea of its alternate history (I believe that the first time I encountered the concept was with the game “crimson skies”, but I was too young to really understand it at the time. I just thought the game took place in the future, I remember specifically that they mentioned “the Great War” in that game, and not knowing that was the original name for World War One, I thought it was such an uncreative name for a war. But I digress...)
Eventually I learned that the rights to fallout had been bought by Bethesda, creators of what was at the time my favorite game, Oblivion. When I found out fallout 3 was going to be “oblivion with guns”, I was thrilled. I remember reading online about how a lot of fans of the old games weren’t happy about this, and I couldn’t understand why. Fallout 3 came out a couple years later, and although I remember not having too much fun with it at first, it quickly became my favorite game. Then new Vegas came out. I was skeptical at first, but when I saw the spinoff would essentially be a new fully fledged fallout game instead of a glorified expansion, I was interested. The fact that the game had Iron sights was enough to make it better than 3, but I also liked the characters and quests a lot more, and the fact that it incorporated lore from the originals (fallout 3’s references to the originals not withstanding). It helped gameplay-wise and graphics-wise that I got it for pc and could install mods. When I went back to playing fallout 3, I truly realized how much better the writing was in NV. I began to sympathize more with the old fans.
Once I figured out pirating around 2012, I downloaded the original fallout, and I pretty much instantly loved it. Even the combat, which surprised me as I didn’t really like turn based combat before. Eventually bought fallout 1 and 2 during a steam sale, played fallout 2 (both with and without the restoration patch), thought it was even more fun despite having a lot of stupid shit in it (that I admit is often genuinely funny).
Up until the release of fallout 4, I split my time between 1,2, and new Vegas. I tried 3 with mods but I couldn’t even handle it anymore. It was just so much worse. Yet somehow, I was still excited for fallout 4. Even when I saw the gameplay trailer, I made excuses like “oh I’m sure there will be skill checks for crafting items” and “maybe a voiced protagonist won’t be so bad” (I remember that leak kotaku released saying that they were looking for a voice actor for the protagonist and that he would deliver the “war never changes” line. They even mentioned something about a character that’s like “buddy holly crossed with vin diesel”. The leaked documents sounded so fake and unbelievable to me. Those ideas were terrible. Bethesda’s not that stupid, right...? I would go through a similar situation later with mass effect when I saw a reddit post saying the next game would take place in the andromeda galaxy. Stupid idea, obviously fake, right?)
I was foolishly waiting for when I would get to choose my tag skills up until the first time I leveled up, and saw that god awful perk tree. I should’ve known they would do something like that, they already did it from oblivion to Skyrim. From there the game just kept getting worse. Dialogue was horrible. The options you get in the first quest are help Preston or do nothing. They give you power armor right away, but they make it cost fuel. There’s only a couple types of guns, just randomly modified. I still had some fun with the game, I liked the power armor, but after about 100 hours between a couple different characters (never actually completed the main quest) I gave up.
I would later learn of all the lore mistakes and outright retcons from the internet. I never actually ran into the kid in the fridge, or read the terminal mentioning jet in a vault. It was kind of heartbreaking, not to be melodramatic, but this was probably my favorite game series and fictional universe, and now I realized that not only was it pretty much dead, but it was far beyond saving. It was so unique and satisfied my desire for gritty post apocalyptic/sci fi rpgs.
Anyway, sorry if this veers too off topic but thought I’d share how I first discovered fallout and how I became a fan of the series.