What makes a "Fallout" game a real Fallout game to you?

Brahmin Noodles

Brahmin Noodles

Still Mildly Glowing
I'm making this tread in responce to the general opinion here that Fallout 4 isn't a real Fallout game (which I agree with). But then I thought, "what makes a Fallout game a real Fallout game?" For me it's interesting setting and locations, the well-written characters, narratives, and side quests, and the deep RPG mechanics, and the abundance of choices with meaningful consequences. And, when I look at this list, I see Fallout 4 has none of these things. Instead of a Fallout game, we got Borderlands 3. Anyway, I can feel this post starting to drone on, so I'll shut up for now and see what your guys thoughts are on what makes a Fallout game a real Fallout game.
 
Vergil said:
Wacky out of place attempts at humour and overbearing 50s tracks that try way too hard to be ironic.
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Aw, hey, come on mate, the radio is probably the only good thing about Fallout 4. Well it would be if it didn't use 3/4ths of its songs from Fallout 3.
 
Ragemage said:
Aw, hey, come on mate, the radio is probably the only good thing about Fallout 4. Well it would be if it didn't use 3/4ths of its songs from Fallout 3.
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Some songs are fine but good Lord almighty does every other track need to make a reference to atomic bombs, radiation or fallout?
 
Being set in the West and, being made by a company that cares about the source material; the second one's far more important than the first though.
 
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Vergil said:
Some songs are fine but good Lord almighty does every other track need to make a reference to atomic bombs, radiation or fallout?
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True enough. That's why I liked New Vegas's radio so much more. I can't even think of any songs in NV that had to do with atomic warfare/bombs. Though I'll always like the Billie Holiday and Ink Spots songs on the FO3 soundtrack.
 
Companions dropping their panties when I pick locks and 200 year old decorations, lots of decorations. If I can't get those two things I guess I could settle for made by Obsidian on the box.
 
Being true to the lore:
  • Not say one thing in one game and then say a totally different thing on the next one.
A sense of urgency:
  • That does not feel like it will wait forever for example:
    • get water chip or vault dies, get GECK of village dies, find the guy who shot you in the head before the trail gets cold find your dad and find your son.
      • Those last 2 give a sense of urgency but it is not reinforced by the game, we can just forget about it if we want to.
        • NOTE: The FNV one gives a sense of urgency but does not reinforce it much either to be honest, but it has all the other good things still going for that I think it might work better this way, it is like "hey you can go look for that guy or you can just not", while in FO3 and FO4 they are constantly reminding you by dialogue that you need to find your father/son and it is really important to you.
Be who you want to be:
  • The wastelands are still ruthless and lawless places, only in settlements there is some kind of order and peace .
    • But even in some settlements (specially big ones) we can find people that are only working for their own selfish/evil/greater good plans.
    • So have different people that have different opinions and reasons to go against the "normal alignment" of the settlement.
    • No "this settlement is good so everyone in it is good and nice" and "this settlement is evil so everyone in it is evil"
  • Freedom to choose what our character will do or say:
    • Who will he/she join, kill, rob, protect, help, encourage, discourage, etc.
  • Give motivations for why should our character do or say whatever he/she does or say.
  • SPECIAL, skill values and even perks have a purpose outside of just crafting/fighting/carry weight/etc:
    • Basically the "world outside" of your character will reflect your character's abilities and traits, how your character speaks/deals with a problem or quest/is seen or perceived by others/etc.
Be who you don't want to be:
  • Yeah, it is the opposite of what I mentioned just now, but it's also not:
    • No matter what people do in life, most will never become who they want to, or else we woudl mostly all be rich and healthy:
      • No matter if you're a good person, a bad person or something in the middle, the way you deal with problems or the way you reach a decision, you rarely have any control on what might happen after it:
        • EXAMPLE: You're a goody two shoes, so you decide to take out a gang that has been kidnapping children from a settlement, you go in guns blazing and kill the evil kidnappers, only to find out later that the kidnappers were actually saving the kids because in that settlement some kids are sacrificed to some dark god or just made into the main meal of a great annual feast or something.
  • Get reputations and/or karma status based on what you do ingame:
    • EXAMPLE: You're actually a good person, but you just got robbed of all your possessions and beat up as soon as you reached that settlement, and dumped on the graveyard grounds. You have nothing now, no caps, no weapons, no armor, nothing... But there is a gravedigger shack and inside you find a shovel, well you can use it to try and dig something nice from a grave or two, so you decide that you would never do that in normal circumstances, but this is an emergency, so you shovel away, get some equipment and get ready to beat up those thugs... The problem is that the gravedigger was hiding and saw you, now you have a reputation of being a grave looter and people will not like you as much or avoid you completely.
Limits on our character's strengths and make it so our character can be different from other characters:
  • Notice how Bethesda's Fallouts do not have traits? Well I say a Fallout game should have traits because:
    • In a way it allows to personalise the character right from the beginning.
    • Gives a bonus but also gives a penalty, so no free bonuses.
  • SPECIAL points should be hard to get, they are your character's physical and mental state so those shouldn't be easy to change:
    • Make it so we have to give something back to increase 1 SPECIAL point:
      • Have to spend a perk slot, have to give a lot of money and spend a lot of time to get the point, have to do something really hard to do ingame to get that precious SPECIAL point, etc.
        • NOTE: Basically everything that Bethesda did not do in their Fallout games, remember the perk Almost Perfect in the Broken Steel DLC for FO3? or the Bobbleheads? or now in FO4 how we can raise 1 SPECIAL point when we level up.
  • Perks shouldn't be given easily:
    • Perks shouldn't be given every level up, nor more than one perk each time one levels up.
    • Special perks (given outside of levelling up) should involve required effort for the kind of perk it is:
      • Do something easy, get a very "weak" perk, do something that requires a lot of hard work/time/money/extreme difficulty then you get a better or more powerful perk.
  • Can't have all or MAX out the perks, skills, abilities, etc on the same character.
Have at least some interesting quests, doesn't even need to be all.

Have believable characters, factions and situations.

I am getting tired, I have been typing this post for more than 30 minutes :confused: so I will stop now, I am probably missing some other stuff but I think I have enough for now :postviper:.
 
A real Fallout game is a Role Playing Game.

I love all the gameplay/crafting/extra stuff in Fallout 4 but there is no role-playing game to be found. As I have previously said, if there was an RPG somewhere in Fallout 4, then all these great additions and improvements would make it a true game of the decade contender. Instead, I often feel like i'm playing an MMO or Borderlands.
 
To be honest I think the crafting makes you stupidly OP especially when you can craft all the best parts to each weapon, even though I find it tedious and annoying. Don't know who's bright idea it was to add junk hoarding simulator to the mix but it was a chore. Think Underrail did some of the crafting elements better.
 
A Real Fallout Game needs to not handhold you too much. It needs to value world building over convinience. If you make a stupid decision, that decision needs to stick. None of that "Forgiven in 3 days" shit.

For Example: In FO2 if you sleep with the Mob Bosses daughter, and then get beaten up by a group of gangsters outside her door.
Or in FONV when you can do a quest to expose the Van Graffs, and they found out and are permanently pissed off.
 
I'm not going to go in and say a real fallout game has to be an RPG, I feel it can do good under the right people if it stepped out of that genre a little more.
But for me, a Fallout game has to have some consistency in tonne and lore.
I guess the feeling of isolation helps as well, also choices that allow you to pretty much tell your own story in the game.

It must also have limits, and most fallout games outside of 4 have limits. The player doesn't need to be God. In many cases, they just have to be some guy who ends up saving the day.
Also, a dark sense of humour about itself works. I like the fact that new Vegas is just a surreal experience about a post man deciding the fate of Las Vegas. That concept isn't over played either in the game, it just has enough oddity that it's funnier when you think about it.

In terms off RPG Fallout however, I would say the idea of being any character inside the game. Also, there should be an emphasis on action over story, it should have the perfect mix of both where the actions fits around the story, not the other way around. I also like the idea of allowing your character to pretty much write their own story.

I think my final answer is just allowing it to be my own play to play it in any style I want.
 
You almost got all of mine and I am lazy, so I stole yours and edited it.

For me it's fully realized "What do they eat?" settings and locations, the well-written characters, well-written narratives, well-written side quests, DPA-RPG mechanics, the abundance of choices with meaningful and meaningless consequences, and the absence of Emil's diarrhea writing/participation.
 
Well, what I consider to be a true Fallout game has already been summed up by the rest of the posters here; Fallout is, at its core, a role playing game--ever since Black Isle started the franchise, that's always been one of its key features. What Fallout 4 seems to forget is that, while you can give us a starting goal and even a backstory, you can't make it consume the Character.

When we played the original Fallout games, there wasn't a lot of interpretation to your characters past. One was a Vault Dweller, the other was a Tribal. But you had complete control over their personalities; were you a cruel and ruthless murderer, or were you more of a wielder of words? The original games and NV all had some amazing outcomes to their quests that I honestly didn't expect! Hell, I didn't think the Khans were going to get any mention when I beat the first game, but even a seemingly tiny quest like that got mention in the end credits!

No matter what path you chose, at the end of the game your choices mattered. Make the wrong choice and the NCR would never have become to force it is today, or the Master's Super Mutants would raid Vault 13 in what is probably my second favorite non-standard ending in the Fallout franchise behind siding with Father Elijah.

In Fallout 3, Bethesda took out some of those key elements. It didn't matter if you blew up Megaton or helped the Ghouls kill everyone in Tenpenny Tower, very few people would even know it happened at all, or for that matter care. Another thing Bethesda took out was that Fallout, in my opinion, was never meant to be a game about surviving a Post Nuclear wasteland. It was about rebuilding what was lost in the war so many years ago--picking up the pieces and making something new.

Fallout NV, as most of us will agree to, was far more faithful to the franchise in this regard. The world wasn't a desolate wasteland sitting in stagnant rot for 200 years like DC was, it was actually becoming more civilized--even if, in the Legion's case--that civilization was being brought on through bloodshed. The war has been over long enough that people have the desire and the means to rebuilt. To quote Dead Money's catchphrase, the series struck me as humanity "beginning again."

Fallout 4... um.. it was about shooting things, I think? With not choice or consequence? The game touches on the rebuilding civilization part, but completely cuts every other aspect of the franchise out of the equation. At the end of the day, Fallout 4 was just a FPS wearing Fallout's colors.

So to summarize, Fallout is, to me, about choices and consequences and rebuilding what was lost. And, in hindsight, the wacky humor is a welcome staple Bethesda needs to work harder on.
 
Honestly, what makes a Fallout game Fallout to me is simply respecting the damn lore, knowing what the important aspects are to explore (humanity, religions, ideologies, politics, the mysteries of the pre-war world) and good writing.

There could be a tell-tale game (which are fairly linear) that is Fallout and so long as it followed what I just said then I'd consider it more of a Fallout game than Fallout 3 and Fallout 4.

My preference will always be for it to be an RPG series but I really care more about what I just stated than I do the RPG elements. Like I said before in another thread, a game could have the most amazing RPG elements out there and it wouldn't matter if the rest of the game is a boring piece of shit. What draws me in to Fallout is its world, what it explores and its writing. So long as a Fallout game adheres to those three things then it is a real Fallout game to me.

Buuuut, my preference is RPG's.
So my preferred 'real' Fallout game would be one where (along with the previous three criteria's) choices matter, always. From stats to skills to perks to traits to dialogue to quests to faction relations to exploration to gear. And for the game to offer as many choices as possible in order to give the player as much freedom as possible to truly roleplay.
 
From the original Fallout's Vision Statement:

2. There is often no right solution (or dang, we have some moral dilemmas)
3. There will always be multipled solutions (it's more fun that way)
4. The players actions affect the world (and the world reacts to the player)
5. There is a sense of urgency (the player moves, no sitting around in our game)
8. The Player has control over his actions (it is a role-playing game, after all)

Of pont 8 I quote "We want to keep the feeling "Why can't I do that?!" to a minimum, to avoid frustrating the player. We want to cover a spectrum of gamers, and the actions they might want to do", because it's something that Bethesda's Fallouts are seriously lacking compared to the other Fallout games. I mean, Jesus, you couldn't force your companions into the water purifier without a DLC.
 
I forgot about the original design philosophy of Fallout, that's my new criteria for what "makes a Fallout game", it has to follow that design philosophy and, be well written.
That's it, come on Bethesda, I'm sure you can manage it, you've made good RPG's before, just do it again.
 
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