I stand by every word I said about Fallout 3. All it really takes is looking at the “Nearly Ultimate Fallout Guide” and seeing just how much depth and reactivity was in the world. Once you read that thing and see how responsive the games were to your character build, actions, how much depth was behind its scripting, your opinion of Fallout 3 will change. HAS to change, if you actually deep yourself “open-minded”... and what a vastly abused term that is.
To declare the originals to be “nostalgic outdated products of bygone era, etc” is intellectually lazy and reeks of ignorance. We have a generation of gamers who are unable to see beyond appearances, and naively believe that graphics engines and gameplay evolved over time at equal pace.
This particular discussion is filled with content-free, kneejerk comments with people who either never played the originals, or they addressed them like a linear Diablo-type romp, “beat” them, and in return got exactly what they put into them.
What really happened, of course, is that Fallout 1/2 were on the forefront of innovation in the late 90s.
Since then, gameplay technology took giant leaps backwards. While the focus of F1/2 was on creating as convincing illusion of freedom as possible, modern games are merely walking simulators, where you’re still locked into the story like a straitjacket, but hey, you can travel all over a giant map, meaninglessly wasting time. Case in point: GTA, Far Cry, Skyrim/Fallout3.
Mass Effect pretends to have choice&consequence, but it barely has any. The popularity of consoles ensured survival and thriving of the “dudebro” version of RPGs, where instead of gameplay depth or meaningful choices, you get awkward sex scenes.
I never had to “draw maps” while playing Fallout. This statement betrays the article author’s ignorance of the franchise. Fallout’s interface was and is very workable, and the Steam version works fine on modern machines. And if you have a problem with small UI... lower your screen resolution. Problem solved.
The irony is that Fallout 1’s 3D assets which were later dithered and scaled down into 640x480 8-bit graphics, had higher polygon counts and better artistic style than any models in Fallout 3. So despite the game looking pixelated or blurry these days, it has better aesthetics.
It also has an easier-to-use, less confusing interface. It has color and character to its visuals, and its world was designed with some thought. The writing is compact and effective, and the dialogue system in itself is far ahead of Fallout 3’s, not to mention the DM-simulating description window.
Fallout was an innovative game, at the forefront of many gameplay advancement which we never got to see expanded upon. Fallout: New Vegas took some of them, i.e. modular settlement outcomes, but it still wasn’t as reactive of a world on the same granular level as Fallout1/2 were.
The world design was better, and was filled with memorable locations and characters. The freedom of player action was there. The writing was better. The combat was better. Your stats affected a ton more things than they did in Fallout 3.
In Fallout 4, they already declared that the dog will be invulnerable, because they want to shove a bunch of cinematic scripting down the player’s throat.
But why would the player ever care about the dog if the dog cannot die?
Coincidentally, Dogmeat was one of the most attached-to characters in original Fallout. Players went to tremendous lengths to keep him alive, even though, through a gradual increase in combat difficulty, he was nearly-destined to die.
Bethesda never got Fallout, and they never will. The article’s author gleefully mentions the series going away from its CRPG roots, as if that is good thing.
This kind of lack of consumer discernment between genres is why I buy a shooter like Far Cry 3 and my first task is to skin boars to gain more bags for weapons, and then I buy an RPG like Skyrim and do essentially the same thing.
This sort of meaningless genre interbleed is why I try to play Alien:Isolation and throw hands up in frustration when it makes me “craft” things. You thought old CRPGs wasted time? Oh Lordy, they got nothing on slow walking simulators and bear hide crafting time-wasters of today.
In Fallout you could actually RUN. You could also speed up combat tremendously. The fast travel system was frustration-free and provided a great sense of a much larger world than there actually was, through its encounter system. Not all those encounters were about combat, either.
Wasteland 2? Never was meant to be Fallout, never became Fallout. It was just Brian Fargo’s simplistic vision of Wasteland, Fallout’s spiritual predecessor, which nonetheless had more atmosphere and immersion factor than did Wasteland 2. Essentially he made a squad shooter, something like Fallout: Tactics, but with less atmosphere and depth.
Protip: throwing tomes of filler text at “those nerds” doesn’t mean your game is deep. It just means you have a certain simplistic vision of your demographic, and in the end you’re making dog food. Quantity over quality and all.
But anyway... there are many detailed criticisms that can be aimed at Fallout3, and have been for years. You can find them on NMA and RPG Codex, and I won’t repeat them all here. The bottom line is, Fallout 3 is more than a terrible game. Its success is a symbol of cultural decline.
That decline is real, and this article and its comments represent the sordid reality of it all.
Develop some intellectual curiosity, for god’s sake. Stop treating games like clowns that entertain you while you passively lay back on your couch. When you vote with your wallet, the industry has to change.
It must change.
