Why is Fallout 3 so loved ?

Which is odd, because that audience is probably more used to Oblivion and in comparison every cool sandboxy feature of FO3 is small, pale, linear and limited. You'd think a game that so many fans claim to be all about freedom and exploration would be actually scolded for making it so smaller and more limited than the game it was based on. Not to mention the fact that it openly copies elements of Oblivion's story too, but makes it shorter and somehow less entertaining.
 
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Players get hypnotized by the flashy effects and wide open field. So the developers can say all of these lies and people will think it's true, if only because it's vaguely imitated. The Fan Dumb is so horribly severe that they'll create these great big fallacies in their head despite everything just being a very cheap illusion. Bethesda is obviously very good at twisting people's thoughts while also somehow lowering the bar. Again. And Again.
 
SnapSlav said:
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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Eeeeexcept... it kinda is. And about 1/12th into the game you have a bit of trouble even remembering what the story was, and you're being reminded about it by hallucinating about a psychic shaman while you stumble around a very gory version of monkey island in a desert which for some reason has combat encounters, and then you can end up in what is technicaly a whole different game about gangster sterotypes and forget that there's an actual wasteland, and then you find this geck you've been asking everyone you meet about like a character out of a Monthy Pyton sketch, and it's a suitcase given to you by a talking storm monster from diablo 1 caves and THEN you're really lost up a creek when it comes to what you're supposed to be doing, stumble upon the final town somehow, get told by some guy to go fetch him "vertibird plans" out of somewhere, somehow end up on an oil platform and find out that the premise of the first game which you may or may not have played was bogus in-universe and that the president of the united states is the real monster and he had a more solid connection to your village than just about anything else in the entire game world somehow and that not only were you really special but your entire village which you only interact for half an hour is truly special.

Weeeee.

And it actually took me several years as a kid to even figure out there WAS a main story to Fallout 2, and never have I ever actually managed to take it as anything other than a bizzare joke/crude satire (even compared to some other stuff in the game)/some seriously nutty paranioa/something they either pulled out of their ass as the deadline approached or something they simply left out of the game for some reason like so much other stuff XD

The central story for Fallout 2 in shot is "we had to come up with a way to start you off with no weapons, have you chasing a nebulous mcguffin, and the bad guys had to have more powerful power armor than you had in the previous game because that's what you do with sequels".



I guess the draw of Fallout 3 can be attributed to people not generally interested in fantasy getting to experience open world for the first time. There's shades of this in many dieahard Fallout 2 fans, too, your average modder would spend a year fiddling with gun minutiae and get upset that their favourite RL gun isn't portrayed realisticaly enough, while barely even registering the story, lore or other stuff. And i guess for a generation of people Fallout 3 was as close to "realism" as you could get to not lose them to a proper shooter, and as far away from anything actually imaginative as to alienate them. So it's an open world shooter with tons of stuff which was novel to a lot of peole who were waguely aware or responsive to it because it's so derivative (like all of fallout from 1 onwards) but they had nothing to compare it to to make it pale in comparison (because in comparison to their usual fare it was probably brilliant and way more immersive).

Aaaaand, that's kinda legit. There were a huge number of people who only played Fallout 2 for the gun porn and the gory death animations and the ability to shoot whoever you wanted, many of them are convinced it's the best game ever made...
 
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Crni Vuk said:
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.
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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!
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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!
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You know too much. Korin will send his armies of anti-christ tomato fallout 3 fanboys against you specifically.
 
Harken said:
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.
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Uhmm as far as I remember it was Dr Mobious the one that had the Roboscropions, not Dr. 0. That guy was just a hysterical douche with an inferiority complex, he disassembled machinery while trying to sound smart. The whole of OWB actually manages to keep the tone of the failed future of the Fallout universe quite well, we may have people working without brains and hearts, dna splicing, actual AIs applied to electrodomestics and scientists keeping themselves alive by transfering their brain to a robot, but all of those things also fail spectacularily, the Courier being about the only Lobotomite that works, the silliness of the Think Tank being a combination of insanity, neural degradation, drug addiction, lack of morals and outright mind rape that Mobious implemented on them to keep them from becoming to dangerous for the world, Mobious himself is only a big hammy villain to keep them busy on their useless struggle to defeat their "arch nemesis", the whole of OWB is actually quite a depressive place behind all the sillyness, Ulysses actually managed to talk them back into sanity momentarily with a simple question about themselves, and the whole place is full of instances of racial violence, grave desecration, blatant animal abuse (Gabe) and complete loss of porpouse. On te surface you might just see a bunch of funny looking robots bickering amongst themselves about Hand Penises but when you explore the place the real tale of the Big MT is much more sinister and sad.
 
Perhaps I could have worded that better. I was just listing things out and happen to make it appear as if I was saying Dr. Venture made the roboscorpions and such on accident. Anyways, the fact that Old World Blues is actually debatably as dark as Lonesome Road under the surface while still being comedic and satirical is largely why I used it as an example. But I also used it as an example because Fallout isn't normally so deranged. OWB had all of the common tropes of a Cosmic Horror Story except for eldritch abominations and aliens. Fallout has never been like that in the main story. FO1 had an army of Super Mutants shattered by a charismatic guy who literally lived in a cave and then everything went to shit. FO2 had a tribal take down an army of walking Tank Men somehow and then some things went to shit. FONV has a mailman destroy two or more armies and take over Vegas for someone, potentially themself, but everything will probably go to complete shit, making this a total shaggy dog story in the end. All three games (but to a lesser extent FO2) tend to keep their aesops and themes consistent with each other to a certain extent. OWB had a totally different aesthetic from any other part of the franchise and only resembled it in the fact that everything started looking a lot worse when reading in-between the lines. Or in OWBs case, just reading a little more carefully.
 
So your argument is that if we only see things on the surface and oversimply them to a single sentence they are dumb, mmmkay.
 
My point is Fallout games generally have the same structure. Person's society needs macguffin, person gets macguffin, encounters big army, resolves conflict. Admittedly, OWB is a DLC and much like the others isn't necessarily going to be like an entire Fallout game, but it's more different than others. If it wasn't labeled as Fallout and used somewhere else, the likelihood of anyone noticing it was suppose to be Fallout is smaller than someone figuring out the Devil May Cry was supposed to be a Resident Evil game, not taking into account that Capcom admitted that was the case.

Once again, being so very different from the majority of Fallout, it isn't such an excellent example for why Fallout can be funny.
 
OWB: Mailman is brought into a new area, he has to retrieve 3 mcguffins for the think tank and then defeat a bad guy that leads an army of roboscorpions, then he resolves conflict.
 
You're treating it a bit too vaguely. Most coherent stories have a protagonist presented with a conflict, retrieve a macguffin, and solve that conflict with it. In Fallout, one conflict against nature or whatever leads to a second conflict against a psychopath and his army. In OWB, one conflict against a psychopath and his army leads to a second conflict against the effective placeholders of the protagonists home.

The macguffins are tools to contribute to taking down the supposed big bad, rather than save a hometown or something of that nature. Jacoren and the Elder both were actually on the protagonists' respective sides unlike the Think Tank and the Master, Richardson, or Caesar weren't actually the closest thing the games had to a big good unlike Mobius. The closest thing to the typical Fallout macguffin is the Courier's brain, but unlike other parts of Fallout it is the center and source of the major conflict. It remains the core problem even after the true enemy is revealed.

You might call the reversal of roles a plot twist, but the other games never really had something like that and plot twists are a very big deal in a story. It's a bigger deal than any other complication one may present, such as a paramilitary organization actively terrorizing the wastes. And people. Actively.

Even though OWB may vaguely follow the same format as any other Fallout, it both differentiates itself from them in a multitude of ways and lacks as many of the typical tropes as FO3.
 
Dude, you are hte one laying it extremely thin and shallow, you only aknowledge the conflict in the game that is convenient to you and simplify it on the thing you are criticizing. Also you are judging what fallout is by very vague and abritrary things that almost any story has.
 
Did you said that the MacGuffin of the first part is important in the second part in Fallout games. Mostly, they are excuses to kick in the plot and make you leave home.
Water ship is never mentioned by the SM. The Enclave have some Geck in their lockers, Benny/Platinium chip have some relevance in the FoNV second plot, but they are already dealt with, at the time. Dad act as a living macguffin in Fo3 first part. He is dead in the second part. Sure i might help you fuel your rage or carry on his legacy in the second plot, but Project Purity essentially replaces him as MacGuffin. There is no "initial" Macguffin in FoT.
 
^ Not just used to kick of the plot in the first 2. Combined with the time limit on the quest to find them they are used to lead you through zones in a semi-linear fashion. Once you find the Geck in FO2 you really have no idea what to do or where you were "supposed" to go next. In FO2 you're rather clearly instructed or pointed towards first a westward journey all across the map to VC, and if you do the quests there, you're then istructed to go on a whole map journey south to Vault 15. The geck is unimportant after that point, because if you found it in the intended way there's not too many places left to go to.

It's used for mostly the same purpose in fallout 1, to keep you from finding/grinding stuff around the wasteland, because the mechanic where it takes 1 bullet to kill an enemy who can drop a gun worth 1000X times more is essentialy unworkable otherwise.

The fact that people played them less linearly (well, 2 more than 1) is more of a failing on the part of having an interesting main plot than anything else.
 
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naossano said:
Did you said that the MacGuffin of the first part is important in the second part in Fallout games. Mostly, they are excuses to kick in the plot and make you leave home.
Water ship is never mentioned by the SM. The Enclave have some Geck in their lockers, Benny/Platinium chip have some relevance in the FoNV second plot, but they are already dealt with, at the time. Dad act as a living macguffin in Fo3 first part. He is dead in the second part. Sure i might help you fuel your rage or carry on his legacy in the second plot, but Project Purity essentially replaces him as MacGuffin. There is no "initial" Macguffin in FoT.
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Yes, that was my point on the macguffin side of things. As I previously stated, the Courier's brain remains important, even becomes more so in the latter half of OWB, much unlike the water chip, GECK, Pops, or the platinum chip outside of Mr. House's questline.
 
Imma let you finish, but I just gotta say:

I finally got off my arse and installed a bunch of survival mods for F3, and if I totally ignore the plot and act out a wasteland scavenger or raider, it's pretty damned good. Question there is: Can you really call it F3?
 
Oh boy. Using mods in FO3 can actually make the game decent. My last character in FO3 was a child-killing, mass-murdering nazi slaver cyborg (actually possible with mods). It was strangely satisfying to first go through the entire Survival Guide quest, slowly, with the best posible ending and immediately slaughter the entire town of Megaton with exception of Moira, who got to be a completely silent house decoration object for the Tenpenny suite (complete with a slave collar, of course) after the nuke detonation.

Honestly, when the game finally brings you to that point when you think: 'Sod it. This wasteland is an incoherent mess. Why the hell should I bother to play as someone remotely sane?', then you plan the most screwed up Pirate Zombie Ninja Robot character you can think of, download the appropriate mods and just go batshit, the game becomes quite enjoyable actually.
 
Warhawk said:
Imma let you finish, but I just gotta say:

I finally got off my arse and installed a bunch of survival mods for F3, and if I totally ignore the plot and act out a wasteland scavenger or raider, it's pretty damned good. Question there is: Can you really call it F3?
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I think of that particular package as "New Vegas: Grey Edition" myself.

It's a sticky wicket. Some people (myself included) are a bit iffy about giving F3 credit for the fact it can be modded into a pretty seamless game, or as close to seamless as Gamebryo allows for-- after all, it gets enough acclaim as it is, and often in areas where it fairly inarguably hasn't earned them. If we take the point of gaming to be the end-user experience, though, F3 can indeed deliver an exemplary one, even if a sizable amount of the credit belongs to third-party hobbyists.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm not inclined to think modability had a lot to do with the the game's popularity. It certainly doesn't account for all the console fans that thought it was the best thing to happen to gaming since controllers with buttons on them. (I know you weren't implying any such thing, I was just commenting on the subject as it relates to the greater question at hand.)
 
Well, if you look at how Skyrim was marketed, it seems they did use modding as a major selling point (one of the biggest, next to 'FRIKKIN DRAGONS MAN!!!'). The whole Steam Workshop thing (a failure as a modding website, but a testament to how important milking modding was to the markeing department), the news-like things on Steam (I dunno, I think they said something about mods), the Game Jam video. I thought that all this came from how popular Oblivion and FO3 modding was.

In Bethesda games modding is a pretty big thing thanks to the CS/GECK/CK thing. And the software Bethesda provides makes it relatively easy and allows for spectacular results (Tamriel Rebuilt for Morrowind being probably the best example). With modding sites like nexusmods, those games are kept alive and well for years. The only problem is that recently all quality writing and game design was replaced by modding software and a 'don't like it - change it' slogan.

As for console gamers, look - we're talking about people, who use an analog stick as a substitute for mouse and are happy about it. Who knows? Maybe a monochrome Oblivion is what they needed.
 
Never got what was the point of the Workshop thing outside of TF2 and why some news websites were actually saying that Fallout 4 should make use of it, I meas Nexus Mod has existed for years and has the biggest userbase, they also provide unique tools for easy installation and conflict resolution for mods.
 
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