What makes the classic Fallout entries deep?

I found that the original Fallout had deep characters. Even if they were cookie-cutter models or made of clay, they felt like plausible people that actually lived within that world. The main antagonist of the game has actual motives instead of just being another run-of-the-mill punching bag.
 
Is this what you mean by deep?

Mechanically, it offers many different solutions to a problem rather than forcing you undergo a strict quest structure. Also, there are choices and consequences.

hag said:
i don't mind an unremittingly wicked villain, but it doesn't work in Fallout's context. black and white morality is incompatible with nuance, and thus, realism.
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I'm very much against the concept of moral relativity. I don't think beating your wife is morally acceptable regardless of where you live. While it does sound like I'm strawmaning a point, I do believe that people are irrationally applying different moral standards to other people. For example, it is conventional wisdom that poverty causes terrorism but that is false.
scholar.harvard.edu/barro/files/02_0610_mythpoverty_bw.pdf
I believe that it is what people tell themselves to comfort themselves in humanity innate goodness.
What I love about Mad Max: Fury Road is that it shows how good people act in a world without trust. Even in a world like that, you have a choice to do the right thing.
 
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I'm going to talk mainly about Fallout 1 here, because Fallout 2 while not necessarily less plausible, is by far more camp than fallout 1, and doesn't do this as well.

I wouldn't describe Fallout 1 as "Deep" by a long-shot. It wasn't exactly philosophical, or despite what others may think didn't really raise any issues, or try to discuss real world topics in depth.

However, what made Fallout great was how realistic the range of characters felt. Very few characters were stereotypes of themselves, and they were written in very subtle ways.

For example, you can infer that Aradesh is distrustful of outsiders, but he never outright states it, and still acts polite and curteous.

Or how (Unless you play a low intelligence character) Butch is actually quite manipulative, mentioning how the other caravans "Ain't honest like me."

Even quite a few minor characters felt like they were written in a way that placed the brutal realism of this world over player convenience. Like how that homeless guy at the Hub will offer to tell you how to find a Water Chip for 100 caps, and if you give him the caps he says something among the lines of "Try looking in a vault.", like this was incredibly memorable for me, because so few games have your character essentially get cheated, yet it is a realistic scenario.
 
hag said:
yikes! i didn't mean to insinuate i condone moral relativity.
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I didn't mean that. I was trying to use it to jump to my point that moral ambiguity isn't what make Fallout's writing good. Let's take for example the Water Merchants in FO1. You are given a quest to kill the boss of Water Merchants. You could be a good person and warn him but not in a meaningful way. For example, you could tell him that someone is out to kill him but he is too paranoid for it to make a difference. You could tell him that you were hired to kill him but they would try to kill you. I didn't really liked how purely negative the Water Merchants were portrayed but I wouldn't change that aspect.
People complained about how evil the Legion were and praised the civil war in Skyrim. However, I couldn't give a shit about the civil war in Skyrim and neither could the people in Skyrim besides the fanatics.
 
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It helps that the games don't feel like it was just someone's second draft.

hag said:
Junktown is exemplary of the idealism vs. utilitarianism dilemma—in the original ending, the obvious "good" choice, Killian, was actually the disadvantageous choice for the continued survival of Junktown. Fallout was never about traditional ideals of good and evil insomuch as morals and pragmatic survival—which, i believe, is one of the things the later games got wrong. i don't mind an unremittingly wicked villain, but it doesn't work in Fallout's context. black and white morality is incompatible with nuance, and thus, realism.
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I think the main issue of that they didn't telegraph the consequences of siding with one or the other very well. They did a better job with Mr. House by giving out the pros and cons although FO:NV does sometimes take it overboard with Dr. Mobius basically spelling out all your options. It is still a lot better than how FO3 handled Tenpenny Tower. (BTW: That is one of the shallow attempts of moral ambiguity that Bethesda always manages to sprinkle in the last minute to make itself deeper than what it is.)

I don't know what is the thought process of these games but I'll try to speculate. Magic's R&D coined (or at least frequently used) the terms "Top-Down Design" and "Bottom-Up Design". The former refers to having an idea and turn it into a mechanic; while the later refers to having a mechanic and making an in-game explanation for the mechanic. I would imagine that Bethesda, Black Isles, and Obsidian had different approaches to these. For Bethesda, its "Top-Down Design" is basically wacky bullshit like the Ghoul Mask which sounds like an item from the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. It is making every weapon immediately become weaker for every usage. It is introducing the do Y thing X amount of times to get better at it in TES. It is removing as much abstraction as possible for the sake of "muh immershun" and what Todd Howard said "The more we can say yes to the player; the better we are.". Its " Bottom-Up Design" is basically introducing level-scaling, adapting popular mechanics like settlement building or dialogue wheels, and making sure players don't miss out anything or feel any consequence even if they already finished the main quest. It is making the player the leader of 4 raider gangs just to have an evil settlement system. It is letting players use Teddy bears as ammo. I wouldn't really say Bethesda is exactly lazy. I listen to the different dialogue options towards John-Caleb Bradberton; and despite all the choices being meaningless, it has slight changes in his disposition. Bethesda made Codsworth dictate a long list of names. Bethesda just has really fucked up priorities.

What made the original Fallout titles deep is attention to detail and polish.
 
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