Should Fallout 3 be considered canon?

Thing is that Fallout 3's story isn't good, it actually has some of the worst writting out there.
 
CT Phipps said:
I think the only place which really invoked the feels in New Vegas the way Fallout 3 did was Dead Money and I hated the gameplay there.



Realism doesn't matter to me as long as the story is good. I don't mind stuff unchanged from the Pre-War era in Fallout 3 because it's such a desolate and dangerous place--albeit I think Fallout 4 overdid it since it's supposed to be a reasonably settled area.
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But the story that is told isn't good on any level. As a writer yourself, you should be able to recognize this.
 
Fallout 1 starts with the image of 2 american soldiers executing a Canadian citizen while they occupy their territory, Fallout starts with a recount of the resources wars that lead the world to were it is, Fallout 3 starts with a slow panning of some "HERLARIOUS PROPS! NOW WOOOSH POWER ARMOR!", Fallout New vegas starts with a long tracking shot stablishing the different factions on the region, Fallout 4 starts with your character in his suburban house getting ready for a ball.

Now, the 3rd and 4th games are considered the most atmospheric? Cuz they have teddy bears and skeletons in impossible poses.
 
CT Phipps said:
Honestly, I don't think continuity should stand in the way of a good story.
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You're saying that as if we can't have both.

CT Phipps said:
Fallout: New Vegas was awesome but it didn't feel like it had any sense of tragedy from the Great War which coated everything in Fallout 3.
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Go back and take a look at Tim Cain's quote on how he sees Fallout as he make the game.

The point of any Fallout game (as it should be) is about letting go and begin again (as emphasized by Chris Avellone with Dead Money and, to some extent, both Old World Blues and Lonesome Road). The Great War is literally a history by the time of even Fallout 2, and a thing not to think about anymore, and so everything should've been moving forward and rebuilding the New World from the ashes of the Old World as everything from pre-War is forgotten and left behind, no longer a thing of importance to even talk about.

Honestly, if there's anything 'good' that can be said and remembered about Fallout 3, is the sense of tragedy (like you said) and the atmosphere, not the story or the worldbuilding. Having the sense of tragedy, the 'feelings' from what happened and what's going on right now, doesn't immediately equal to 'good story' being told or whatsoever. Of course, to me personally, all of those sense and atmosphere has fallen apart because I know now, what Fallout supposed to be.
 
Why would there be any tragedy left from the war 200 years later? Bethesda has this obssession with the pre war world that is only comparable to that of a teenager writting a fan fic.

As a result, their worlds feel fake and uninspring, people just sat on their asses for 200 years lamenting the loss of things they never knew and somehow survived without learning how to hunt, boil water or grow crops while also making sure to never loot any of the ruins or move any skeletons to make proper use of space for something useful.
 
Okay, so I'm going to be put this out, skeletons can be good if used well.

Hell, I'm planning on doing that in a game I want to make. Difference is, I want them to be World building, not just there.

An example of how I plan to use them, in a Hospital.

It looks all fine and kind of natural, but then you go into the underground levels of the Building and you find skeletons chained to beds. Read up on a diary about the sort of human exerpiements that went on there.

Don't want to stroke my own ego, but that's an example of how shit the World was before.

The skeletons in fallout 3 told me people died.

Okay.... I know that.
What was the World like before?
What was this setting like?

The only time it ever affected me was when I got a radio message of a guy trying to save his son, and you then you find a family of skeletons.

That told me that the kid didn't get help, they were just left there to die.

That's at least a story.
 
Why would they leave the body chained to a bed to rot until only the bones remain? Wouldn't that stink up the place? What about animals? THe place would be filled with bugs and the people making the experiments there would also be putting their lives at risk by just letting corpses rot to the bone on beds, not to mention they would be losing beds to use for more experiments if they are just letting the bodies on the beds to rot? Why wouldn't they just throw the bodies into a mass grave and keep the interesting findings in chloroform or something?
 
Walpknut said:
Why would they leave the body chained to a bed to rot until only the bones remain? Wouldn't that stink up the place? Why wouldn't they just throw the bodies into a mass grave and keep the interesting findings in chloroform or something?
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It just became abandoned. I'm trying to make my Ken Fallout knockoff with this (still trying to be somewhat original).
 
AlphaSlayerZX said:
I will still never understand how people would think putting skeletons and items in certain positions equals good environmental storytelling.
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It's really not meant to be too far for me. It's actually more of a joke as people are told the pre war life was good, now its like 'well, it really wasn't'
 
Skeletons only make sense in places where people died alone and there would be no way to find them like caves and secret shelters. Otherwise they are pretty dumb elements to use to "build atmosphere".
 
"What are they eating and from where?".

After realizing this the atmosphere for 3 really fell apart for me.

Major settlements like Rivet City or Megaton are completely devoid of a food source AT ALL. This is not so in Fallout: New Vegas which has a reason for every town being where it is and for the most part explains it with growing crops. In 3 you have people living around a bomb, a ship without any food side from 200 year old cans, Children of The Corn living in a mine of sorts right next door to super mutants, and just things and people and towns placed randomly which make no sense in a larger context.

Fallout: New Vegas had real world setting, with everything from simple food to the deep factional interrelations being fleshed out deeply.


Fallout 3 is more like a playground, fun to ride on, but nowhere near the level of the former.
 
Yeah, Fallout 1,2 and NV hold an entire World.
They ate three games which are part of a bigger story and they feel natural.

Fallout 3&4 are just games which don't feel natural. I wouldn't even say 3&4 take place in the same Universe because they feel so different.
 
Gay Tony said:
"What are they eating and from where?".

After realizing this the atmosphere for 3 really fell apart for me.

Major settlements like Rivet City or Megaton are completely devoid of a food source AT ALL. This is not so in Fallout: New Vegas which has a reason for every town being where it is and for the most part explains it with growing crops. In 3 you have people living around a bomb, a ship without any food side from 200 year old cans, Children of The Corn living in a mine of sorts right next door to super mutants, and just things and people and towns placed randomly which make no sense in a larger context.

Fallout: New Vegas had real world setting, with everything from simple food to the deep factional interrelations being fleshed out deeply.


Fallout 3 is more like a playground, fun to ride on, but nowhere near the level of the former.
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Yeah, I honestly think the atmosphere that people praise about Fallout 3 is the most overrated element of the game. I mean it's an impressive atmosphere for a normal post apocalyptic game. But it doesn't work for Fallout 3 because of the time it takes place in. The atmosphere is essentially so immersion breaking for me that it makes it really difficult for me to try and enjoy the game.
 
CT Phipps said:
It was a game about loss, sadness, and the inability to rebuild until a messiah from Vault 101 got the ball rolling.
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Judging from this and your Skyrim posts I get the feeling you prefer playing the ultimate hero character rather than someone more realistic.

CT Phipps said:
This has been stated several times and I don't believe it. Mostly because the Washington D.C. setting has a lot of tragic bits of environmental building (the teddy bear flapping in the wind), skeleton placements, stories on the computers, and adventures based around various elements of the Pre-War related to American contradictions. For example, Paradise Falls and the slaving adventures are all about how America the supposed land of the free had slavery as one of its bedrocks for years.

I think a lot of detractors of the game would feel differently about it if they took a bit of time to just soak up the atmosphere.

But again, what is art to some people is trash to another.
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The War has been over for 200 years by the time Fallout 3 happens. If it was set only a few years after the bombs I might have agreed with you.

Besides we see countless corpses of people who have died more recently, if anything they should be the ones getting a reaction out of you, not skeletons of people who died centuries ago.

Atmosphere is great and all, but not if done poorly and at the expense of credibility.

CT Phipps said:
Sorry. I think Fallout 3 is easily the best and most atmospheric of the Fallouts and the other games don't even come close. Fallout: New Vegas was awesome but it didn't feel like it had any sense of tragedy from the Great War which coated everything in Fallout 3.

Disagree but I cared more about rescuing the Constitution and destroying Paradise Falls than I ever did about the Water Chip or GECK.
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Again the Great War happened 200 years ago and the Pre-War world was not a nice place to live in. Mass starvation, lack of resources, oppression and disease. The Great War was never meant to be the focus of Fallout, it merely was the event that changed everything.

What purpose does getting the Constitution serve? It doesn't help anyone aside from some old historian. The GECK and water chip actually serve to help people, rather than just doing nothing.

CT Phipps said:
Realism doesn't matter to me as long as the story is good. I don't mind stuff unchanged from the Pre-War era in Fallout 3 because it's such a desolate and dangerous place--albeit I think Fallout 4 overdid it since it's supposed to be a reasonably settled area.
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What's the point in having new Fallout games and a timeline if nothing changes from the Pre-War era? I wouldn't be interested in playing any of them if they were all set in places that hadn't changed at all in 200 years.
 
Messiah stories are stupid. Plain and simple, they are power fantasies which can be fun, but they have no place in Fallout. Even without the Vault Dweller the wheels of the world were rolling, same with the Chosen One and the Courier.
 
Actually, I would say NV had more of a sense of tragedy from the great war.

It showed that human nature cannot change, even after a historic event changes everything.

I'd say New Vegas also has a lot of aspects which make it tragic in on itself.

I get you like the ultimate hero and someone saving everyone, but the thing is, there is no internal conflict, and that's fine for a game like COD or so, but in an RPG where choice matters, internal conflicts just aren't interesting.
 
Black Angel said:
You're saying that as if we can't have both.

Go back and take a look at Tim Cain's quote on how he sees Fallout as he make the game.
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Yeah, yeah, new society's post apocalypse blah blah blah.

The point of any Fallout game (as it should be) is about letting go and begin again (as emphasized by Chris Avellone with Dead Money and, to some extent, both Old World Blues and Lonesome Road). The Great War is literally a history by the time of even Fallout 2, and a thing not to think about anymore, and so everything should've been moving forward and rebuilding the New World from the ashes of the Old World as everything from pre-War is forgotten and left behind, no longer a thing of importance to even talk about.
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Yeah, which is less interesting than what I think Fallout 3 did of showing the ruined past and the failure to rise above it and do something different.

Honestly, if there's anything 'good' that can be said and remembered about Fallout 3, is the sense of tragedy (like you said) and the atmosphere, not the story or the worldbuilding. Having the sense of tragedy, the 'feelings' from what happened and what's going on right now, doesn't immediately equal to 'good story' being told or whatsoever. Of course, to me personally, all of those sense and atmosphere has fallen apart because I know now, what Fallout supposed to be.
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"supposed to be" is kind of a narrow bandwidth to define the story in. I wouldn't want all Fallout games to be Fallout 3 and I don't think the games should be but as a story about a post-apocalypse hellhole in the ruins of the center of the goverment which destroyed the world, I think it did a really good job. It was the game that really did well with the pseudo-Fifties nostalgia too.
 
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