cratchety ol joe said:
To touch on both previous posts, at the revised end of FO3, paladin Tristramcakes, or whatever his name was.. the guy that takes over the pryde for a while... anyway, whatever his name, He says in one of his little conversation pieces (around when he gives you the blood sampler thingy) he says something to the tune of:
"the supermutants are multiplying at an alarming rate..."
What the hairy fuck?! multiplying?! where? how? what the fuck are you on about Paladin Tedious-plot??
This is just shockingly poor game 'cannon' and its clear that the writers of FO3 do not understand the history of the SM...
This may be only a tiny snippet of information, but to me it speaks volumes of what the creators of FO3 see in SM's ... and to simplify my otherwise ranty bit that would normal be here...
Orc's ...
sorry folks had to edit this, due to photo-fuckit, delorting my picure
Considering how different super mutants are in Fallout 3 in comparison to Fallout 1 and 2, it's probably a good thing they ignored the original cannon rather than built off of it. It's also better if you consider these Super Mutants to be of a different "species."
Fallout 3's Super Mutants originate from Vault 87, which is actually really plausible if you think about it. West Tek and the Vault experiment were both contracted by the Government and thus the Enclave. When seizing all of the FEV prior to the war, it is possible for the Enclave to have an undocumented transfer of some FEV into Vault 87. Considering Vault 87's location, aka nowhere near the rest of the supply, they can avoid the Pearl Harbor syndrome of having all of it in one tightly locked giant target. Most likely, FEV is stored elsewhere in the country as well. After all, the Enclave was a clearly paranoid lot if they considered the idea of leaving the planet a solution.
Anyways, Super mutants in Fallout 3 behave different than Fallout 1 and 2 muties. Gameplay wise, they try to kill everything they see. Story-wise, they're apparently brutally smart. What they'll do is capture people, bring them back to Vault 87, and then use them to create more Super Mutants (Hence, reproducing like rabbits.) Sometimes they'll use people as food too and then throw the leftovers into FEV (hence the creation of Fallout 3's very human Centaurs, which fit the name a bit better than Fallout 1/2's Centaurs). Apparently they're not COMPLETELY dumb, just... in a permanent state of roid rage.
And they're weaker due to gameplay differences I'd say. Bethesda took an awesome rare enemy in Fallout 1/2 and made it a common slaughterfest in Fallout 3. This is true about Raiders too as well as Deathclaws sometimes. It's just simply the fact that they have no idea of how to handle level scaling I'd say, or enemy AI. If they actually made their enemies scale properly, it'd be better. (such as having Super Mutants in certain areas spawn 5 levels above you always or something, but in fewer numbers.)