Why is Fallout 3 so loved ?

I am not saying that Ghost & Aliens fit very well with the lore.
I was just correcting about the wrong word used to mention them.
For having an inconsistency, you need two facts (or more) that contradict each other, can't fit together, no matter how.
IMO, talking animals, for instance, are pretty wacky and might be considered as lore breaking, but on the other hand, it can't be considered as inconsistent, as there is nothing that prove that talking animals don't exist. It doesn't make the existence of talking animals right, just not inconsistent.
On the other hand, when they state that Myron & Angela are late teenagers, that Myron invented jet, and that Leslie Bishop took jet before marrying John Bishop, and give birth to Angela, that have almost the same age as Myron, it isn't much relevant to get pissed off, but it is still inconsistent, as not matter how you see it, those facts just can't fit together. It is a factual thing, not a subjective one.

Thanks for the link about New Reno, i always questionned that tendency to bash New Reno (lore-wise). Now i will have the opportunity to answer that thread and defend the city.
 
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I never had a problem with the city itself, but the casino bouncers/guards were not supermutants, yet were inhumanly large.
 
naossano said:
I am not saying that Ghost & Aliens fit very well with the lore.
I was just correcting about the wrong word used to mention them.
For having an inconsistency, you need two facts (or more) that contradict each other, can't fit together, no matter how.
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Inconsistent =/= contradictory.
For example, here is article about inconsistency in aesthetics. What I mean by inconsistent is not cohesive. New Reno for me and many others, like Vault Dweller or Brother None (the link), just doesn't fit well into setting. It's kinda theme park design.
 
I think it may be simple...

Fallout 3, while not (in my opinion) a good Fallout game, is a superb, maybe even perfect, open world RPG/FPS hybrid. I loved Fallout 3 as a stand alone game, with Fallout-esque moments. If you play it as a Fallout-inspired game, it is one of the best made, imo.

But as far as the series goes, Fallout 2 was the peak. Sure FO1 had an impeccable and concise story and atmosphere, and NV had solid mechanics in a good 3d world, and F3 had a perfect sense of scope and exploration... but FO2 had the best blend of all the qualities of a Fallout game, though it may not have necessarily excelled in any one area, overall it is (with the RP) the perfect Fallout game, in my opinion.

Fallout 3 is the perfect open-world RPG/FPS post apocalyptic game. It just happens to be a bad Fallout game.
 
It can't be a good RPG if all the quests are just mindless kill/fetch quests, a lot of the dialogue makes no sense, the quests are extremely linear and your options do not make an impact on the world around you.
 
Korin said:
Side note:
Fallout 3 is why I came here to NMA and years later, I'm practically running the site now.
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A Fallout 3 fan runing NMA now ... and they said ... we would not go with the times. Now they took it over. This is the end, Brothers!
 
Hard to call something a "perfect rpg-fps hybrid) when the combat is so unbalanced and simplistic, the quests are dumb, the writting is worse and you have to pay 10 dollars toget the real ending....
 
I guess I'm the only one who took things like aliens and ghosts as metaphor for "weird folk stories people spread in the wasteland." Your character could be tripping balls for all you know; games have established narratives, whether you want your character in them or not. So when aliens abduct brahmin and Nessy shows up in Lake Mead, I just interpret it as some funky story or another your character blabbers on about or heard in some bar. The alternative is to interpret it literally: Fallout Isn't Serious. Walking the middle road, where it's half serious and half acid trip, demands that you suspend belief. That destroys immersion and reduces it to a game. Which is all it is. You can shun either half with religious fervor, or just enjoy whatever parts of it suit your fancy, but to say that it was ever 100% one or the other is a mistake, and fighting over it is really... pathetic. That goes for every game in the series, including the first one. You can argue all you want about game mechanics, about how the atmosphere or the proportion of serious/funky changes, which it does, but the core of it "never changes."
 
Saying all that's gloriously simplifying what it means for a game to be a permutation of narrative. As a storytelling device goes, "how serious" the game is does matter, and reducing it to "was never serious" does terrible disservice to its genuine past attempts at sincerity. It wasn't always like FO3, after all. FO3 was the latest installment (at the time) in an already-established saga, and waving that off as "things change over time" is just as much a disservice to those stories, too. The fact of the matter is, whether or not you are aware of how merciless and cruel "old money" can be, when you read The Great Gatsby, you suspend your disbelief as the book takes you into a story where the "old money" IS merciless and cruel. You haven't experienced it yourself, but the story compels you to believe that this is the way it was. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but that's for the story to decide, and for its qualities of storytelling to persuade you to believe.

As an ongoing saga, a component in a much greater story, you measure the tonal shifts in particular games as a good or bad thing. It's perfectly legitimate to scrutinize New Reno as having "gone too far" in certain themes and tones if they clash with the already-established lore of the story. If FO2 had been its own entity, bound to no other story, then it would be overly facetious and absurd to do so, because it's establishing itself, and its appropriate "proportions" of zany and serious are of its own design to determine. But it wasn't. It was a component of the greater Fallout lore. FO3 is no different, which is why extraneous decisions by players such as yourself to "excuse" absurdities as acid trips or wild and exaggerated wastelander stories again does disservice to the greater whole of the story. Fallout didn't establish that what you saw could be taken to be "either" what the character is experiencing, or potentially an out-of-mind experience; it established that the game was literal, and that while often tongue-in-cheek and satirical, it WAS quite serious.

Was each vision of Hakunin real, and was Anna's ghost actually the ghost of that long-dead little girl, and if so did these aspects of FO2 clash unfavorably with the established "realistic" world of Fallout? Or were these things both anomalies and, like Special Encounters, excusable as heat stroke, or the manifestation of the character's childhood trauma of "breathing too many smoked herbs" from their questionably-sane village shaman- or indeed, mere acid trips -and thus could these things be easily excusable as colorful narrative that does not clash with the established "realistic" world of Fallout? Either may just as easily be the case. But the important distinction is that in both cases, you pay respect to the fact that the series WAS being serious, that jokes and gags and satire are all good and fun, but that at the end of the day the experience of the game's central story was not meant to be some zany joke to be waved off just because it's convenient.

Besides, FO3 clearly demonstrated a visible difference between what is and isn't a hallucination, as demonstrated by a particular sequence in "Point Lookout". Clearly, the alien abduction was not a hallucination. So don't excuse it for one; it was just poor writing. No way around it.
 
SnapSlav said:
... Either may just as easily be the case. But the important distinction is that in both cases, you pay respect to the fact that the series WAS being serious, that jokes and gags and satire are all good and fun, but that at the end of the day the experience of the game's central story was not meant to be some zany joke to be waved off just because it's convenient.
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Then what exactly is the difference or distinction between something serious and not serious? "The game's central story" has always been weighty and cohesive across the whole series, focusing on straightforward themes of what it means to be human, the lengths people with ideologies are willing to go, the costs of freedom in the wastes versus the burdens of organizations, and so on. And surrounding that are tropes and idioms, random encounters, heavily ironic and sardonic events, people, and circumstances, coincidences that are totally meta in execution, and even in-house developer jokes. Many of those things are only barely plausible given the lore, and that goes for every single Fallout game, wherever the lore ends up. Yes, even Fallout 1's random encounters. You can call those "non-canon" like the Nukapedia says but if you really go there then you're blatantly disregarding the line I drew earlier: You can chop bits and pieces out of 'all' Fallout games and arrive at a totally sensible story, theme, and believable universe that doesn't have a billion funny coincidences for every single one, whether or not they line up with each other. You cannot take each one in its entirety and draw those conclusions, nor can you line them up and make them coherent between each other. Maybe Fallout 1 has less of those goofy, implausible and meta things overall, but it does have them. If it didn't, none of it would have translated into later games, since it would have had no basis for existing in the first place.

If this is really all about Fallout 1 "purity" then honesty that ship sailed with Fallout 2, and it's moot to continue the fight through Tactics, BoS, 3 and beyond. And to be frank, I'm beginning to think that it's the very fact that there's compelling themes alongside total incoherent nonsense that makes Fallout interesting for most folks. It's intriguing, whether or not it's sensible, and that it gets more noticeable and more ridiculous with every title, while at the same time mass market appeal increases, says a lot about design decisions from day one.
 
Also, you can have humor when talking about a serious subject, while still being faithfull to that subject.
Humor doesn't necessary mean "silly stuff".
 
TheChosen1 said:
Crni Vuk said:
Korin said:
Side note:
Fallout 3 is why I came here to NMA and years later, I'm practically running the site now.
Click to expand...

A Fallout 3 fan runing NMA now ... and they said ... we would not go with the times. Now they took it over. This is the end, Brothers!
Click to expand...


At least it's not a fanboy.
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well if you plan to take over something, then you dont reveal your motivations and the whole plot all at once. You prepare the community, soften the resitance, test out the possibilities, how far can you go? And then. When things are ready. You take over. Either by force or from the inside. Has no one here watched Star Wars!

For all we know! Korin could be Todd Howard in disguise! Or even worse. Todd Howards first fan!
 
naossano said:
Also, you can have humor when talking about a serious subject, while still being faithfull to that subject.
Humor doesn't necessary mean "silly stuff".
Click to expand...
In Fallout, that's really hard to pull off. The setting itself is simply unsuited for such a thing and the only way to establish humor is some sort of silly gag. Throughout the entire franchise, the only comedic or supposedly comedic things that weren't either charming silly stuff like the Unwashed Villagers hunting a spammer or repulsive silly stuff like anything to do with aliens were blatant narm like half of the words that come out of Jim Cummings mouth.

Fallout is just a bit too dark and serious to have humor work unless we were supposed to laugh at Set's "happy tummy", which is unlikely.
 
Warhawk said:
I guess I'm the only one who took things like aliens and ghosts as metaphor for "weird folk stories people spread in the wasteland." Your character could be tripping balls for all you know; games have established narratives, whether you want your character in them or not. So when aliens abduct brahmin and Nessy shows up in Lake Mead, I just interpret it as some funky story or another your character blabbers on about or heard in some bar. The alternative is to interpret it literally: Fallout Isn't Serious. Walking the middle road, where it's half serious and half acid trip, demands that you suspend belief. That destroys immersion and reduces it to a game. Which is all it is. You can shun either half with religious fervor, or just enjoy whatever parts of it suit your fancy, but to say that it was ever 100% one or the other is a mistake, and fighting over it is really... pathetic. That goes for every game in the series, including the first one. You can argue all you want about game mechanics, about how the atmosphere or the proportion of serious/funky changes, which it does, but the core of it "never changes."
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Just to be anal, "Nessy" in Lake Mead only gets reported after you float up the old Bomber plane, so it's obvious that the sightings of the monster are just people watching the resurfacing of the plane from afar.
 
Harken said:
naossano said:
Also, you can have humor when talking about a serious subject, while still being faithfull to that subject.
Humor doesn't necessary mean "silly stuff".
Click to expand...
In Fallout, that's really hard to pull off. The setting itself is simply unsuited for such a thing and the only way to establish humor is some sort of silly gag. Throughout the entire franchise, the only comedic or supposedly comedic things that weren't either charming silly stuff like the Unwashed Villagers hunting a spammer or repulsive silly stuff like anything to do with aliens were blatant narm like half of the words that come out of Jim Cummings mouth.

Fallout is just a bit too dark and serious to have humor work unless we were supposed to laugh at Set's "happy tummy", which is unlikely.
Click to expand...

In my opinion, it already happens many times in Fallout.

The Myron discussions about Jet, the hubologists, the Tabitha radio. All of these topics are kind of sad, are dealt with some level of writting quality, but in the same time in a tone that mainly evoque laughs. But it is not because you are laughing that the topic is light or they handled it on a silly way. They manage to make you laugh, then feel bad and think about it, which is one of the reasons i enjoy the game writting so much.
 
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I'd say Myron and the hubologists are endearing at most, and although Black Mountain is actually funny and well implemented even in the game world, it has even less dialog that repeats itself even more than any of the others, which is really saying something. Outside of Fallout 2 (which had an inconsistent tone anyways) and that special case (which was barebones), good humor is a little hard to find. OWB did a pretty good job as well, but like Fallout 2 in places, it had to vastly alter the typical tone of the series and employ Dr. Venture in order to pull off things as absurd as roboscorpions and... promiscuous lightswitches...

Once again, Fallout's natural tone isn't suited for humor. That tone changed on occasion, but not everyone is very accepting of that change.
 
You might not look hard enough or have a more strict definition than me.
When i look Cass/Veronica dialogs, for instance, there is also a good amount of laughing about topics that aren't silly IMO, and we are outside of Fo2.
Those aren't limited to 1-2 events but actually something i see quite often in (at least good episodes of) the franchise.
 
Ah, well, everyone has a different sense of humor. More or less. Yours is perhaps a bit too sensitive to be considered normal.
 
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