Mothership Zeta ...

S

StalinsHomie

First time out of the vault
So, Mothership Zeta pretty much destroyed the whole Fallout universum for me.
Fallout 3 was a hit in the stomach but that Alien DLC was even worse for me.

I can still enjoy the old FOs and FO:NV but no matter what I do, Fallout 3 just keeps bothering me.

Bethesda is going to make the next Fallout so that pretty much worries me too but that's not what this thread is about.
Ok, let's get to the point, what is your opinion on Mothership Zeta and do you guys think it's canon?
 
Hello,

Well I wrote the review for it on NMA some years ago so that should give you some thoughts how I felt about it.

The gameplay was really average as its pretty much a straight shooter and when it comes to that Fallout 3 just flatly falls on its face as its a rather half assed FPS.
The design is as linear as it can get and skills really don't change any of the progress in the game other than opening some redundant extra options.

As for the concept itself, I feel it has no place within Fallout.
References to aliens was always either an easter egg or something from the fiction within the Fallout universe such as comics and movies.

One might say "Why do you accept mutants such as Super Mutants, giant insects, and so on but not aliens?".
I admit that is a hard one to respond on (so if anyone can help me on an answer for that one it would be appreciated), but for now I say I accept those things because it fits within Fallout's vision of a post nuclear nightmare where humanity's technologies and pollution has created whole new species that have found their place within the new world.

Aliens, well there is no need for them nor is there a place for them because despite all the monsters and insane computer intelligences the basic idea behind Fallout is still that humanity is its own worst enemy.
Plus if there is an armada of alien ships out there planning to take over the world, what could stop them from succeeding?

The NCR, the Enclave, the BOS or the Legion would be perhaps be a torn in their side but basically the Fallout setting would be over.


Recently I have been gifted a copy of Fallout 3 GOTY and I have been trying it out again as it has been two/three years since I last played it, but after having played Fallout New Vegas Fallout 3 feels like such a massive downgrade.
The limited options, barely any role playing, the terrible design of locations.

It only feels more half assed than it was before and I can't for the world imagine that people felt that this was a worthy follow up to Fallout 1 and 2.

I honestly hate this game and its DLCs and I wish it was decanonized.

Like you I also worry about Fallout 4 as it will most likely be as bad as Fallout 3, with Bethesda having learned none of the lessons Obsidian taught them when they overhauled their material and improved it in FNV.
 
I think the reason why we don't accept Aliens in the Fallout universe is because they destroy the whole feeling of a world that was made (rather destroyed) by human hands.
Super Mutants are human experiments, Ghouls were/are created by radiation, the list is very long.

The downed ship in Fallout 1 was an awesome easter egg because it was ... well ... an easter egg.
In Fallout 3 Bethesda just simply showed us how they didn't/don't understand the Fallout universe.

Before the DLC came out we had the downed Alien Ship as an easter egg in Fallout 3. It wasn't as bad but it still left an ugly taste in my mouth just because instead of putting something new in the game they just recycled an old easter egg.

What I'm basically trying to say is that the Aliens themselves are only a part of a big (bad) picture. This picture just fits into the bad picture that Fallout 3 itself is.
A good example for that are the trailers they made for Fallout 3 were Todd and some other guys were talking about black humor.
 
All I can remember how Emil thought it was hilarious and black humor if you cut off some old lady's head and put it on display on a shelf.

It did make me wonder if there was a serial killer loose in Maryland, going around killing pensioners and that the police and the FBI were still looking into his identity.
 
The funny thing about this trailer is, that it showed us more about the game than all the other trailers combined.
It showed us how the humor is going to be etc.

What I think is really funny, is the fact that I was pretty put off by this trailer but most of the people I know got really hyped.
I don't have to mention that those people never played any of the original Fallout games.

It seems as if the only thing they cared about was the gore and the only reason why they thought Fallout 1 and 2 were funny and awesome was due to gore.

EDIT:
That guy was pretty disturbing.
It makes you think how some people must feel while playing this game when even a few of the developers are kind of ... psychopatchic
 
I just responded on a somewhat similar article on another forum.

To me the so called 'progress' Bethesda made in Fallout was make it more dumber, 'sexier', more explosions, a story that doesn't require much to think about or remember when you play it only occasionally, and a lot more content that has no 'content'.

The focus was also on a group of people who would never care about Fallout because it was not flashy enough, not enough farting around, not looking to much like your average random shooter.
They talk to much in the old games, the gameplay involves way to much strategy and long term thinking than depending on player reflexes.
Its just not fucking casual enough.


We live in a time in which innovation is basically what you can do with an existing idea, brand or license, change it in such a way that it attracts a new bunch of dumbasses who could not give a fuck about the original material, and go so much against the concept, the spirit of the original creation that it barely resembles it any more.

Coming up with something new or experimental is received by investors with scepticism and fear as it may not pay out as much as an existing brand may do.

Its not like ideas don't need to develop over time, undergoing change in order to grow, but not all change is progress like a lot of developers and PR people claim.
If a product turns out to be worse because of their improvements they are always reluctant to admit it, hiding behind fan reception or 'artistic integrity' in order not to admit that they did a dumb decision and are now stuck with the result.

If an existing idea can not be developed further, it is an indication that it should be given a rest, and that people should instead try to work on something completely new.

I am tired of the era of 'hack developers' and the dumbasses who praise them.
 
I agree with everythin you said!

The main difference is that Fallout 1 was a game that was made for a certain kind of people. It was made for your typical sci-fi and movie fan. You can feel it while playing it ... heck ... I even feel it when I'm thinking about it.

In Fallout 1 and 2 the pop cultural references where there to make the players feel at home. You had your Star Trek references, your Mad Max references and way more other cool stuff.
Everytime you saw another easter egg you just had to smile, even after the tenth time it was still cool.

Fallout 3 just feels soulless because it was made for the mainstream market. Not that mainstream is bad, it just lacks that special something.
Most of the references were presented in a less subtle way than a punch in the face.


You can even see that the crowd they aimed forward to liked the game, they even loved it ... but that turned a great amount of the hardcore and oldschool crowd away.
It's really saddening to see what people actually love this game, just watch some youtube videos about Fallout 3 and you will even see a hack ton of comments about how bad Fallout New Vegas was.

A lot of gaming "journalists" even often say that Fallout New Vegas was bad because Fallout 3 was the "first game to catch that Wasteland feeling".

Before I get more off topic I just want to say that I should have given this thread another title.

It's a good game and the DLCs are not bad, the problem is that Fallout 3 (hence the name) is supposed to be a Fallout game.
And if there is one thing this game and its DLCs fail at, then it's being a Fallout game
 
It's a TES game with Fallout settings, I like it, but like you said, it lacks that feeling the originals had, NV improves that but it lacks something also, and is more chaotic and less polished, but more faithful nonetheless.

If you want to play FO3 again, I recommend you to play only with Broken Steel, the other 4 DLCs are very expendable, at least for me. I don't like the way Bethesda focuses his DLCs, with separate areas and all that shit. The last time I've replayed NV I haven't done the DLCs, is f*****g tedious.
 
Fallout NV feels so unpolished because they had less than a year to develope it and it's basically like Knights of the old Republic all over again.
Way too much cut content etc.
But that is a different topic for a different day.

Fallout 3 is a dungeon crawler and a really tedious one too.
Point Lookout was meh, Mothership Zeta ... well ... we already talked about this one, Operation Anchorage ... don't even get me started to talk about this one and Broken Steel.

Broken Steel is even more useless because it broke the universe even more, it destroyed 95% of your desicions, it basically forces you into a badly written story (again) and gives you stronger enemies.
By stronger I mean ME MORE HEALTH AND MORE DAMAGE.

It's bad, like really really bad.
You are forced again to help the Brotherhood of Steel again and the only thing you get for it are a few more minutes with Liberty Prime (who is awesome).

Have you ever taken the evil rode and killed most of the Wasteland by putting the Virus into Object Purity?
I did and what did I get for it?
Contradictions!
In the endgame cutscene they show a Rivet City without anyone being alive, but when I visit it after (magically) surviving, everybody is alive again.


The Fallout New Vegas DLC's were all great (in my opinion) but Honest Hearts and Old World Blues were really tedious, in that regard I agree with you.

Bethesda showed us that they have no testicles by letting us play further. The game itself had a pretty good ending, especially as a bad guy because it showed you that your actions had an impact.
Yes, you can destroy the Pentagon after Broken Steel but that has no impact in the world, except gving us a hidden armory.

Fallout 3 is basically what Skyrim is to TES.
It destroyes a lot of the lore, contradicts itself, lures a lot of people to the game/s that nobody wants but still is a good game if you don't see it as a part of its own series
 
StalinsHomie said:
I agree with everythin you said!

A lot of gaming "journalists" even often say that Fallout New Vegas was bad because Fallout 3 was the "first game to catch that Wasteland feeling".
Click to expand...

What I don't understand is why the critics and game review companies like IGN and Gamespot loved Fallout 3 so much, and they didn't like New Vegas as much. Bear in mind, I'm gonna be copy/pasting a lot of stuff from wikipedia right now.

These were all the awards and praise the game got: "Fallout 3 won several awards following its showcasing at E3 2007. IGN gave it the "Game of E3 2007" award, and GameSpot gave it the "Best Role-Playing Game of E3 2007" award.[94][95] Following the game's demonstration at E3 2008, IGN also gave it "Best Overall RPG", "Best Overall Console Game", and "Overall Game of the Show" for E3 2008.[96] Game Critics Awards gave the game "Best Role-Playing Game" and "Best of Show" for E3 2008[97] and GamePro Magazine awarded the game "PC Game of the Year" 2008."[98]

"After its release, Fallout 3 won numerous awards from gaming journalists and websites. At the 2009 Game Developer's Choice Awards, it won overall "Game of the Year" along with "Best Writing."[78] It was also awarded "Game of the Year" by IGN,[79] GamesRadar,[99] GameSpy,[100] UGO Networks,[101] Gamasutra[102] and the Golden Joystick Awards.[83] The game also won "Xbox 360 Game of the Year" from Official Xbox Magazine,[81] GameSpy[81] and IGN,[80] while winning "PC Game of the Year" from GameSpy,[103] GameTrailers[104] and GameSpot,[81] with the latter two also awarding it "Best RPG."[81][105]

Come on, best role-playing game of 2007? :? Best overall RPG? :?
Best writing? :? Don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but I don't think it deserved all of the praise it got. I thought New Vegas was done much better with better writing, better role-playing options than Fallout 3 and so on, and critics still didn't like it as much! :x
 
StalinsHomie said:
Fallout NV feels so unpolished because they had less than a year to develope it and it's basically like Knights of the old Republic all over again.
Way too much cut content etc.
But that is a different topic for a different day.
Click to expand...
Obsidian has a low sense of order and polishment, you must admit that, just look at Alpha Protocol, the funniest thing is that some fanboys tried to compare it with Human Revolution. Yes, the game has more decissions (but with a more linear gameplay) than this last one, but the game is barely playable, even when it uses UE3.

Talking about NV, they packed all the resources from FO3 with the game, even the unnecessary ones, so you can nearly call NV bloatware. New Vegas would have been much better and more polished if they had worked it from scratch instead of working over the FO3 code.

StalinsHomie said:
Broken Steel is even more useless because it broke the universe even more, it destroyed 95% of your desicions, it basically forces you into a badly written story (again) and gives you stronger enemies.
By stronger I mean ME MORE HEALTH AND MORE DAMAGE.

It's bad, like really really bad.
You are forced again to help the Brotherhood of Steel again and the only thing you get for it are a few more minutes with Liberty Prime (who is awesome).

Have you ever taken the evil rode and killed most of the Wasteland by putting the Virus into Object Purity?
I did and what did I get for it?
Contradictions!
In the endgame cutscene they show a Rivet City without anyone being alive, but when I visit it after (magically) surviving, everybody is alive again.
Click to expand...
Agree, but well, at least it tries to merge all the new content with the base game and it adds post-ending gameplay. From the other 4 DLCs I can only highlight the Gauss Rifle.

StalinsHomie said:
The Fallout New Vegas DLC's were all great (in my opinion) but Honest Hearts and Old World Blues were really tedious, in that regard I agree with you.
Click to expand...
NV DLCs has awesome moments, the confrontations against Elijah and Ulysses (this one being the real end boss for me), the companions in Dead Money, Joshua Graham, the humor of OWB, but like Bethesda, Obsidian focused the new content in a linear style separating it from the base game. This breaks the original gameplay, nearly forcing you (OWB and DM literaly) to complete them in order to go back to the real gameplay style.

StalinsHomie said:
Fallout 3 is basically what Skyrim is to TES.
It destroyes a lot of the lore, contradicts itself, lures a lot of people to the game/s that nobody wants but still is a good game if you don't see it as a part of its own series
Click to expand...
Completely agree.
 
kyojinmaru said:
Completely agree.
Click to expand...

Well, I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks that way.

BFox17 said:
Come on, best role-playing game of 2007? :? Best overall RPG? :?
Best writing? :? Don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but I don't think it deserved all of the praise it got. I thought New Vegas was done much better with better writing, better role-playing options than Fallout 3 and so on, and critics still didn't like it as much! :x
Click to expand...

I don't quite get why it won so many awards, maybe it's because it came out at a time where the highest amount of players was new to the whole RPG genre and used to play the big XBOX titles.
Then suddenly comes a gory and "sacastical" game with guns that is not as coloured as Oblivion and all the kiddies buy it.

It just came out at the right time and most of the big sites just went with the hype and forgot that it was part of a series.
That's the only way how I can imagine it.
 
kyojinmaru said:
Obsidian has a low sense of order and polishment, you must admit that, just look at Alpha Protocol, the funniest thing is that some fanboys tried to compare it with Human Revolution. Yes, the game has more decissions (but with a more linear gameplay) than this last one, but the game is barely playable, even when it uses UE3.

Talking about NV, they packed all the resources from FO3 with the game, even the unnecessary ones, so you can nearly call NV bloatware. New Vegas would have been much better and more polished if they had worked it from scratch instead of working over the FO3 code.
Completely agree.
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Yes, I agree with you there, don't know how the developement of Alpha Protocol looked like, but I always imagined it being rushed out or just a mess.

They should have just recoded everything and done their one thing, that would have been great but considering the time limit, yes, I know, that's not an excuse but everybody has to be a little fanboy.

Not saying that Alpha Protocol is comparable to Human Revolution
 
I really like Fallout 3. The Pitt and Point Lookout were both pretty good DLCs. I consider all of it canon apart from one thing. Mothership Zeta. I like easter eggs in Fallout. The TARDIS, crashed alien ships, holy hand grenades but they are just easter eggs. They aren't meant to be taken as serious canon. Mothership Zeta expects me to do just that. Its gameplay and story are both rubbish. The only reason I really play it in my games is because the Alien Disintegrator is such a good energy weapon. The thing that annoys me more than anything else about Mothership Zeta is how it implies aliens started the war.

"The end of the world occurred pretty much as we had predicted: too many humans, not enough space or resources to go around. The details are trivial and pointless, the reasons, as always, purely human ones. "

No Mothership Zeta, just no. I really hope Bethesda write this off as non-canon.
 
Knight Captain Kerr said:
No Mothership Zeta, just no. I really hope Bethesda write this off as non-canon.
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I hope it too, but the thing is, that I hope that they write off most of Fallout 3 as non canon.
The problem with that is, that they made a big DLC that impacts pretty much the whole universe, how couldn't they write it off as canon?

They can't just say, whelp, it's not canon. Abrakadabra, the power of developers!
Point Lookout didn't change anything, Operation Anchorage didn't change anything, I think I already talked about how much Broken Steel made it even worse but I do have to say, that The Pitt was kind of interesting.

If we are talking about the impact on the Fallout Universe, we would have to make Broken Steel and The Pitt canon, just because quite a lot happend.
Yes, they could just never mention Mothership Zeta, but then we would still know it was there.

The problem here is, that even if they just tell us that Mothership Zeta was not canon, well, what was the point of releasing it anyways?

As I mentioned before, I don't think that too many people see Mothership Zeta as uncanon, quite a lot of people consider it the best DLC (just watch some Youtube videos of it) and (again) I already mentioned why those people pretty much nearly destroyed the franchise.

The problem with that is, that what do you think will Bethesda do?
Help to some hardcore nitpickers on No Mutants Allowed and their own Fallout forum, or make it canon and deliver another lore-destroying DLC like Mothership Zeta just because so many people liked it?

Before I keep rambling on and find other reasons to write an even longer text, I'll just say that no matter what they do, we'll be pissed, even tho, I'd be really happy to see the DLC we are mainly talking about as not canon.
 
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