Intelligent Deathclaws or Super Mutants?

[ElloinmorninJ]

How do you guys feel about the Talking Deathclaws from Fallout 2?

The talking deathclaws from F2 are often regarded as a controversial topic to classic Fallout players. People either love them or hate them. Personally, Goris is one of my favorite companions from Fallout 2, and I actually like the talking deathclaws a lot.

One person I talked to on this forum, Atomic Postman I believe, said their role in the game would've been better served by 2nd generation super mutants. What do you guys think?

Personally I believe the deathclaws fit in and the 2nd generation super mutants actually WOULDN’t fit.

a) Because the player wouldn’t really have any inherent antagonism to super mutants in 2, because all the ones you’ve met up until V13 are civilized, and

b) 2nd generation super mutants wouldnt be trusted by the Enclave. They literally rebelled against the Enclave at Mariposa.

 

[MasterworkStone]

Personally I'm against both, I believe that in the world of Fallout, good things should either be rare or fleeting.

That said, Deathclaws are very large carnivores, I believe that eventually they would make wild game scarce and would have to evolve to become leaner and more wary of humans, but also much faster due to their decreased weight making them deadlier opponents in combat.

I like Bethesda's super mutants for the fact that they're an ever increasing problem that self-replicates and intelligent enough to be a serious threat without being intelligent enough to have morals or consider stopping.
I wish there was a way to implement them without it being a massive plot hole.

 

[Atomic Postman]

I grow increasingly unsure of my own suggestion, primarily because my opposition lies with them being farcical but honestly in execution they're done about as well as they could be. It's just that they're such a silly/stupid idea it'd be remarkably easy to fuck it up completely.

I think them being an isolated fucked up oddity is fine, but I don't know. Regardless I wouldn't want them to expand or appear in any meaningful way again.

 

[Deleted member 98605]

I was never enarmoured with Boris, was it? Or the intelligent DClaws in 2. With the Mutants in 2 they are both Enclave hellspawn but...the Enclave should had done something different, too. Revert the D-claw to their pre-war use - stealthy terror monsters. Mutants - the FEV was reset to enhance their own troops, perhaps? Show how the pre-war world was still a horrific place by proxy - this stuff was around or grasped at before the war; and the Enclave flaunting it off would become worrisome.

The Enclave in 2 should had been a bit bigger, a bit more organized, prominent, and doing stuff ala Master's Army in 1. Like Klamath? Shit's close to the shore, it gets wrecked. Redding? Gets buzzed. The Den? A target of the Enclave's moral superiority. Ever creeping downwards, after you, to the bastions of San Fran, Vault City, NCR/SS.... And if you can't knock them back or stop them, the region's going to be Americanized, and it's too bad no one now is American to the Enclave save a few Vaulties. You can toss the BoS at them for a bit to distract them, you can gather a bunch of scum and villainy of the North to annoy them, muster the NCR...but eventually you have to do something.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

I can't say that the talking Death Claws had such an impact on me. Not enough that they would have to return.

As for Second Generation Super Mutants, I feel they only make sense around the ruins of Mariposa (during the time of Fallout 2) as they were accidentally created when slave laborers got into contact with leftover FEV2.

I don't know what would have worked better in Vault 13 in Fallout 2 when you finally find the place.
I am thinking of perhaps some Enclave personnel that are now using the Vault as a forward base but that would perhaps introduce them too soon in the game, ruining when the player finally meets them at Navarro.

Edit: I don't think there should have been a slow take over by the Enclave in Fallout 2, them slowly wiping out or taking over settlements.
Their goals were much different compared to that of the Master who wanted to take over settlements in order to secure more pure specimens.
The main reasons why the Enclave returned to the mainland was because they had to secure certain resources like slave labor, chemicals, and FEV2 though I find it strange that the Enclave did not know about FEV2 until the rediscovered Mariposa.
Even if there was no FEV on the oil rig it would probably have been documented in the Enclave's computer archives that pre-war scientists were working on a biological agent to create super soldiers.

I am not even sure if reusing FEV as now a super killer agent was such a good idea. Not the idea that the Enclave wants to whip up a bug that kills everyone they consider mutants but that it had to be FEV.

It could have been changed so that the Enclave initially wanted to create an army of super soldiers they could control to retake the mainland (without having to nuke it over again), coming to Mariposa to reclaim the facility but finding it in ruins.
They buy slaves from the Den slavers to excavate the base but when the laborers get in contact with FEV2 the Enclave discover how dumb and uncontrollable Super Mutants can be and decide to scrap that plan.

Instead they decide because almost everyone on the mainland is infected with "wild FEV" (not really any physical changes, just that pure FEV2 no longer has its intended result on such subjects) or radiation or any other toxin that they will just wipe out the muties to reclaim NA for themselves.