^ Yep. That's the kinda thing. Engine plays a lot in how and why those games work or don't work, and what each can get away with. And how easy/difficult is to make it not break immersion. It's pretty much a huge part of general art direction, as the isometric engine makes for a more symbolic presentation of everything, while 3d makes a more "realistic" one - and it's much, much easier to suspend disbelief in a more symbolic environment than a realistic one.
Plenty of elements of that go "under the nonsense radar" in orginal Fallouts do so because of the more symbolic presentation. They'd kinda look and feel terrible in 3d and with voice acting. Take vaults - they're presented as unrealisticaly small - towns too. Heck one of the effects of severely improving the resolution in the originals via the graphics patches makes your view extend to 2-3 times than the original, and while it makes it more mechanicaly playable, in many places it highlights just how small the towns really are and how little truly interactive content they actually have.
Then there's the invisible walls - there's invisible walls all over the original Fallouts but you take them as part of how the game persents maps intuitively, you don't bump into them unexpectedly. Or the samey scenery - the art object "fund" of the original fallouts is actually rather small, you soon get used to the idea that spamming computers means a computer room and that most of them are just there to indicate something rather than actually be interactable. But since you have a good overview, interacting with stuff which is interactable is much easier.
Or take the samey wasteland. It's pretty damned samey, and also crowded in Fallout 2, but since most of the stuff takes less time and effort to acess and get through (random encounters) and then dissapears from the map, you forget about all the empty shacks, empty camps, empty caves, empty everything as soon as you're through combat. If it all stuck around the wastelad would be tin shack after tin shack from the coast to arizona, samey and empty and pointless.
This is why I get a rash when I get into modding discussions about "realism" or making the old game elements be more realistic. Not even trying to be remotely realistic, but rather having a very consistent minimalist symbolic presentation is what makes that game work at all.
Making Fallout universe work as well in 3 would require orders of magnitude more effort than Beth put in, and in general, can't really be done adequately in a TeS friendly-engine. So comparing them in terms of story is tricky bussiness - the method of presentation of the story, the medium so to speak, is very different.
Plenty of elements of that go "under the nonsense radar" in orginal Fallouts do so because of the more symbolic presentation. They'd kinda look and feel terrible in 3d and with voice acting. Take vaults - they're presented as unrealisticaly small - towns too. Heck one of the effects of severely improving the resolution in the originals via the graphics patches makes your view extend to 2-3 times than the original, and while it makes it more mechanicaly playable, in many places it highlights just how small the towns really are and how little truly interactive content they actually have.
Then there's the invisible walls - there's invisible walls all over the original Fallouts but you take them as part of how the game persents maps intuitively, you don't bump into them unexpectedly. Or the samey scenery - the art object "fund" of the original fallouts is actually rather small, you soon get used to the idea that spamming computers means a computer room and that most of them are just there to indicate something rather than actually be interactable. But since you have a good overview, interacting with stuff which is interactable is much easier.
Or take the samey wasteland. It's pretty damned samey, and also crowded in Fallout 2, but since most of the stuff takes less time and effort to acess and get through (random encounters) and then dissapears from the map, you forget about all the empty shacks, empty camps, empty caves, empty everything as soon as you're through combat. If it all stuck around the wastelad would be tin shack after tin shack from the coast to arizona, samey and empty and pointless.
This is why I get a rash when I get into modding discussions about "realism" or making the old game elements be more realistic. Not even trying to be remotely realistic, but rather having a very consistent minimalist symbolic presentation is what makes that game work at all.
Making Fallout universe work as well in 3 would require orders of magnitude more effort than Beth put in, and in general, can't really be done adequately in a TeS friendly-engine. So comparing them in terms of story is tricky bussiness - the method of presentation of the story, the medium so to speak, is very different.
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