Fallout just isn't Skyrim

[Canaris]

On 5/23/2018 at 3:00 AM, RJLbwb said:

What is fallout 4- a motion sickness inducer?

 

I think the real problem of Fallout 4 is it  suffers from the problem of  those"Pro-level" combat mods in Fallout and Skyrim; There is only ONE True Way to play it. Fuck stealth, fuck sniping, just get power armor and automatic weapons, mode it all up and spam bullets at the NPCs. Nothing else is acceptable.

 

 

Pure grade A bullshit.

Everytime i play Fallout 4 i have a fucking R6 version of it. One bullet kills everything until you are level 50-60, stealth is life, sniping is the key, proper mine/traps are lifesavers etc. 

 

Dont get me wrong, F4 is by no means an RPG but there is definetely more than one way of playing this game. 

[ToJKa]

12 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

I mean, it's been 2 freaking centuries since the damn bombs fell, you would expect civilization to have been rebuilt to some extent.

Exactly. Think what the world was like on 1818 compared to today.

 

But i reason it so that the last 0 in 200 was originally a typo, and since then they've had to commit to it ?

[FauxFurry]

13 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

This is another of my complains about Fallout in general.

 

I mean, it's been 2 freaking centuries since the damn bombs fell, you would expect civilization to have been rebuilt to some extent. Okay, sure, with most of the landscape destroyed by the war and with mutants, monsters, crazy raiders and other scary stuff lurking around it's not like you can go back to pre-war civilization like nothing happened, but at least, I dunno, not living in shanty towns that look like they were built by meth-head scavengers would be nice.

 

And don't get me started on stuff like vehicles. There's a ton of cars laying around with virtually unlimited amounts of energy thanks to the fusion energy (arguably a bit unstable after all those years and that's why thet tend to blow up if you shoot at them, but since local power grids and lights still work, so would cars); surely it's possible to piece together a working vehicle from enough wrecks, and you only need to find a stretch of highway to have dozens of those. But somehow, it's much better to walk everywhere and use brahmins to carry stuff.

 

Meanwhile, the Boomers somehow manage to get a working B-29 by cobbling together a rustbucket that fell apart inside one of Nellis' hangars 200 years ago with another B29 that has been rusting in the bottom of Lake Mead since 1948 (fun fact: that is a real plane). They must know something the rest of the Wasteland doesn't, since they are the only ones that managed to do such a thing, right?

 

/rant, yet again, lol.

That is the problem that I have with post-apocalyptic fiction in general.

People tend to recover from disasters and re-establish civilization fairly quickly, be it invasion from a rival nation,full scale war, a major volcanic eruption, a flood, a tornado, a hurricane, an Earthquake, a plague and so forth.

A civilization which isn't resilient often doesn't last long enough to experience a large scale disaster, anyway. In-fighting and minor daily struggles would do them in quick. 

 

In PAF, however, human society degenerates into something more disorderly than an average lower mammal social group on the verge of dissolution them moment there is a momentary government shut-down. It is a type of fantasy which completely disregards psychological realism to the point where peoples' behaviors are far more implausible than the irradiated mutant monsters and blasted out glowing Hellscapes, all for the sake of setting up a scenario where people act out on all of their darkest impulses with the flimsiest of justifications. 

[Canaris]

Yeah, that 200 years is easily the biggest Bugfesta Fallouts flaws when it comes to lore, writing and worldbuilding...

Everything about that world screams "war happened max 10-20 years ago" from locations made up from temp shelters, people mindset ( Sierra obssesed about Nuka Cola, Warwick girl supposedly being all about dresses and boys according to her brother, like a modern teenager and not someone already born in the post apo society etc ), state of civilization and so on and so forth. 

Bugfesta should just drop that 200 years and make something with earlier date. 

[FauxFurry]

10 minutes ago, Canaris said:

Yeah, that 200 years is easily the biggest Bugfesta Fallouts flaws when it comes to lore, writing and worldbuilding...

Everything about that world screams "war happened max 10-20 years ago" from locations made up from temp shelters, people mindset ( Sierra obssesed about Nuka Cola, Warwick girl supposedly being all about dresses and boys according to her brother, like a modern teenager and not someone already born in the post apo society etc ), state of civilization and so on and so forth. 

Bugfesta should just drop that 200 years and make something with earlier date. 

It isn't really fair to just blame BGS for that one as it was a flaw in the setting from the start. You can add post-apocalyptic squalor to the list of Franchise Original Sins of the Fallout series.

As for the last line, that is what they are doing with Fallout 76.

It was what they should have done as soon as they got their hands on the Fallout property in the first place yet didn't because of how profitable sequels can be. 

[Benmc20]

And how can we imagine that vegetation can't be regrown past 100+ years ? This absence of vegetation is really off and made the whole fallout universe non plausible.

[Canaris]

56 minutes ago, FauxFurry said:

It isn't really fair to just blame BGS for that one as it was a flaw in the setting from the start. You can add post-apocalyptic squalor to the list of Franchise Original Sins of the Fallout series.

 As for the last line, that is what they are doing with Fallout 76.

It was what they should have done as soon as they got their hands on the Fallout property in the first place yet didn't because of how profitable sequels can be. 

Oh but it is.

In Fallout 1 and 2 you didnt have teenagers acting like modern ones, biggest city entire water supply in the hands of a 12yo kid, crazed Nuka Cola loony fans somehow crossing 1-2k km of the apocalyptic Wasteland to travel to giant amusement park, """""reporter""""" who thinks that threatning mayor of a big town, guy with a looot of guards, guns and power is somehow wise because she writes some shitty paper that everybody hates and because muh "freedom of the press/speech" ( how the fuck she even knows concept like that if she was born good century and a half after the bombs dropped ? ) etc. 

Granted, we could argue that people turning to tribals is kind of a stretch but then again West Coast was "less civilized" and sparsely populated even before the war so its natural for the rebuilding effort to be hampered somewhat and its still earlier after the war. 

 

Fallouts 1 and 2 had some silly shit in them but nothing compared to Bugfesta Fallouts. And even them that silly shit worked with the world at large ( like Den casinos, kids stealing shit from you, tribals etc )

[FauxFurry]

1 hour ago, Canaris said:

Oh but it is.

In Fallout 1 and 2 you didnt have teenagers acting like modern ones, biggest city entire water supply in the hands of a 12yo kid, crazed Nuka Cola loony fans somehow crossing 1-2k km of the apocalyptic Wasteland to travel to giant amusement park, """""reporter""""" who thinks that threatning mayor of a big town, guy with a looot of guards, guns and power is somehow wise because she writes some shitty paper that everybody hates and because muh "freedom of the press/speech" ( how the fuck she even knows concept like that if she was born good century and a half after the bombs dropped ? ) etc. 

Granted, we could argue that people turning to tribals is kind of a stretch but then again West Coast was "less civilized" and sparsely populated even before the war so its natural for the rebuilding effort to be hampered somewhat and its still earlier after the war. 

 

Fallouts 1 and 2 had some silly shit in them but nothing compared to Bugfesta Fallouts. And even them that silly shit worked with the world at large ( like Den casinos, kids stealing shit from you, tribals etc )

That's what the whole Franchise Original Sin concept that I linked to is all about. The flaws existed in the first installments but were well-balanced enough by other positive attributes or were used sparingly enough that they didn't drag down the presentation too much. BGS played it up a bit too much but the original writing staff had their internal conflicts over how much recovery the world was allowed to make over the course of the series.

[Halstrom]

Oh crap... way to much realism... better off playing Real Life

[Je3ky3z]

When modders went from BF1942 to BF2, similar sentiments like this followed. The guys modding BF2 to make it a World War 2 game were like reinventing the wheel. But it went through, and we are thankful for it. The same goes for FS9 to FSX. When FSX introduced a lot of eye candies but little improvements to the flight model, people were divided when moving to FSX. Nevertheless, people progressed to FSX, today FS9 still has a couple of followers, 15 years on. I already had 100 GBs of addon in it, of course I will campaign for developers to support it and abandon FSX, let alone Prepar3D altogether, but it will be foolish to resist progress.

 

There are still people saying that the good old Simcity 2000 and 3000 were great, and Simcity 4 was full of bugs. Today, the same thing goes for people who moved on to Cities: Skylines. The game was said to be "full of bugs". Yeah, Simcity 2000 is super simple and smaller, it is a less ambitious concept. A bicycle will surely be more reliable as a mode of transport than a car, yes? And it could be more involving and fun too. For Simcity 2000's gameplay, the Simcity 4 provide a bigger region, larger possibilities of mods and addons. Cities: Skylines free those city building concept from gridlines and better graphics and water physics engine that is still struggling to produce realistic effects.

 

Elder Scroll V is a fantastic game, I truly like it. The mods available for it were massive, thanks to its years of presence in the market. But after seeing Fallout 4's graphics, I just can't go back. Yes, I have more than 1 GBs of add-ons and countless hours (or even days) of moddings and tweakings on Skyrim. But still, I am hoping for more content on Fallout 4, utilising its superior graphics and bigger world.

 

FO4 is probably the worst (yes it is) out of the modern Fallout series (FO3 and FO:NV), but it is still a fantastic game nonetheless.

 

About the lore itself: it is the same old radiation took thousands of years to dissipate mythical nonsense all over. Chernobyl is a case of Eastern Europe being lazy and having too much land to abandon that swath patch of irradiated area. Japan meanwhile, couldn't afford that. People don't turn into ghouls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki apparently. And if you drive 2012 Mazdas, they are made in Hiroshima, it would probably trigger your geiger counter according to BGS logic.

[FauxFurry]

1 hour ago, Je3ky3z said:

About the lore itself: it is the same old radiation took thousands of years to dissipate mythical nonsense all over. Chernobyl is a case of Eastern Europe being lazy and having too much land to abandon that swath patch of irradiated area. Japan meanwhile, couldn't afford that. People don't turn into ghouls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki apparently. And if you drive 2012 Mazdas, they are made in Hiroshima, it would probably trigger your geiger counter according to BGS logic.

Chernobyl is green with chlorophyll rather than gamma radiation, giving the impression that plants which adapt to atomic radiation are heartier than the usual. Chernobyl's trees are anything but the burned out charcoal sticks that they are in the Fallout series. Right from the start of the series, they underestimated how fast human civilizations rebuild after disasters.

The world should have been an unrecognizable collection of new world powers which no longer even remotely resemble the world of the past with the countries of the old world largely forgotten just like Pompeii(like any number of the game settings on this list:http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AfterTheEnd/VideoGames).

[Je3ky3z]

Yes, I saw that documentary as well. Life flourished in Chernobyl after humans abandons it. But to be fair, Chernobyl wasn't destroyed by atomic blast like Boston in FO4, it is more like radiation leaks from the reactor, which explosions is caused by overcooking pressure from the cooling water storage. The same goes for DMZ (North Korea & South Korean buffer zone) as well as Fukushima area.

 

Surely the atomic blast would have charred trees and buildings like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it doesn't mean that life simply won't regrow. Hiroshima is at least full of parks now, and quite green. One of my gripes about the recent Fallout lore is the decrepit and unrestored nature of the Wasteland. Fallout NV still depicts most of its building to be largely intact and cleaned, wherever civilisation is present. Fallout 4, with its superior graphical engines, goes all-out in showing the unrestored environment of Boston general area.

 

But then again, it is just a silly fictional game that wastes a good "alternate timeline" lore that parted with ours in 1949. The maker just one to get that Mad Max feeling about it, but I agree that they botched the 200 years thing.

[The First Lady of Hats]

Even on a bloody small scale, people of the wastelands don't even rebuild their houses let alone civilization. It's been two hundred years for fucks sake, Imma sure they could have taken that cracked mirror off their bathroom wall and thrown it out, abraxo cleanered thier baths and found something better than a broken mattress to sleep on. About the only person I've ever met in a Fallout game that knew what the fuck he was doing was in The Pitt. "Hey a working steel mill, lets learn how it works and actually rebuild the world out of something other than duct tape and corrugated cardboard." and naturally he was the bad guy so we all murdered him

[Guest]

44 minutes ago, The First Lady of Hats said:

About the only person I've ever met in a Fallout game that knew what the fuck he was doing was in The Pitt. "Hey a working steel mill, lets learn how it works and actually rebuild the world out of something other than duct tape and corrugated cardboard." and naturally he was the bad guy so we all murdered him

Well you know, you can side with him.

[Blaze69]

1 hour ago, The First Lady of Hats said:

[...] Imma sure they could have taken that cracked mirror off their bathroom wall and thrown it out, [...]

I have to say that is probably not only due to wanting to go for the "Mad Max-esque everything is broken and rusty" theme but also because of engine limitations. I'm sure the Gamebryo/Creation engine would crap itself real fast if they tried to add proper real-time reflections (ENB and such managed to add something kinda like it, but not nearly as good as a "native" implementation would be). Thus, all mirrors are broken and dirty and don't reflect (anything but) crap. Much easier to swallow than mirrors being magically absent from the world, I give them that.

 

Same probably goes for my previous rant about vehicles: the engine wouldn't be able to handle it properly either. Hell, it doesn't even handle Vertibirds properly, and I'd be willing to bet those were built using Skyrim's dragons as a base so I consider them more of a "creature" than actual vehicles as they would be coded in, well, pretty much any game that included vehicles at all.

 

Funny enough, I did some browsing and turns out the pre-Beth Fallout games did have vehicles in them. Fallout 2 has the Highwayman, which is literally a regular car pieced back together from wrecks and spare parts, and Fallout Tactics had a Humvee and a Sherman Tank. Whether Tactics is canon or not seems to be unclear for some reason (don't know why, but it would be nice because of this and its weapon list with many real modern not-ugly-abominations-like-the-FO4-"assault-rifle" weapons), but I haven't heard anything like that from FO2, so driveable vehicles would not be lore-breaking.

[Captain Cobra]

4 hours ago, The First Lady of Hats said:

"Hey a working steel mill, lets learn how it works and actually rebuild the world out of something other than duct tape and corrugated cardboard." and naturally he was the bad guy so we all murdered him

Ashur did nothing wrong.™

[FauxFurry]

6 hours ago, The First Lady of Hats said:

Even on a bloody small scale, people of the wastelands don't even rebuild their houses let alone civilization. It's been two hundred years for fucks sake, Imma sure they could have taken that cracked mirror off their bathroom wall and thrown it out, abraxo cleanered thier baths and found something better than a broken mattress to sleep on. About the only person I've ever met in a Fallout game that knew what the fuck he was doing was in The Pitt. "Hey a working steel mill, lets learn how it works and actually rebuild the world out of something other than duct tape and corrugated cardboard." and naturally he was the bad guy so we all murdered him

The East Coast Brotherhood of Steel was in the process of rebuilding the Capital Wasteland but that was all undone by the death of the Lyons family.

[KoolHndLuke]

23 hours ago, Resdayn said:

About the only person I've ever met in a Fallout game that knew what the fuck he was doing was in The Pitt. "Hey a working steel mill, lets learn how it works and actually rebuild the world out of something other than duct tape and corrugated cardboard." and naturally he was the bad guy so we all murdered him

I always sided with him. If for no other reason because he showed some real initiative instead of the usual whiny attitude of most! Besides, most of civilization was built by slaves in the beginning.?

 

In FO4, I got a mod to make the land more vibrant and green- the way it would be after 200 yrs. The city is what I hate. The ugly kits and textures they used for most of the buildings was awful! Even many mods can't make them look that much better. The one thing I adore about this game is the almost too saturated, brilliant colors. The Diamond City Expansion mod really helped there and I can't wait for some more visual overhauls by talented people who care about the game to do even more.

 

I'm running around downtown now with my souped up Mac 10 blasting the shit out of some fools.

[Guest]

 I miss the strong final bosses like the Master, Legate Lanius, Frank Horrigan kind of guys.

2 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

I always sided with him. If for no other reason because he showed some real initiative!?

 

In FO4, I got a mod to make the land more vibrant and green- the way it would be after 200 yrs. The city is what I hate. The ugly kits and textures they used for most of the buildings was awful! Even many mods can't make them look that much better. The one thing I adore about this game is the almost too saturated, brilliant colors.

I mean other guy just wanted replace him and does worse job, Ashur is asshole, but hey he does something.

[ToJKa]

On 6/3/2018 at 5:02 PM, FauxFurry said:

Chernobyl is green with chlorophyll rather than gamma radiation, giving the impression that plants which adapt to atomic radiation are heartier than the usual. Chernobyl's trees are anything but the burned out charcoal sticks that they are in the Fallout series. Right from the start of the series, they underestimated how fast human civilizations rebuild after disasters.

And there is a new species of mushroom found there, that actually thrives on radiation.

 

Yes, nukes do serious damage, but it actually is quite localised. Barring world-wide saturation bombing, including the oceans, nuclear war would not wipe out all life. And even in case of such bombing, organism deep in Earth's crust and oceans likely would survive.

 

Only way for humans to wipe out all life would be to drag a sizeable asteroid to collision course with Earth, and that would be hard to sell even for today's Joe Public ?

And besides, simple organism would survive in the resulting fragments and start life on another planet half an eternity from now ?

[Blaze69]

2 hours ago, Resdayn said:

Legate Lanius

Ah, back when characters were still actually interesting and freaking badass.

Quote

The Courier: Nice mask. Can't wait to take it as a trophy.
Legate Lanius: We shall see how brave you are when nailed to the walls of Hoover Dam, your body facing west so you may watch your world die.

Related, does anyone else miss Terrifying Presence?

Quote

The Courier: I'll wear your head like you wear that dog's. (To Vulpes Inculta)

Caesar: You're the courier who's caused so much trouble for my Legion, and yet you dare come before me. Vulpes Inculta, the best of my frumentarii, is dead. All the bribes I sent to the Omertas ended up buying me nothing. The Great Khans aren't exactly clamoring to fight for my Legion now. The garrison I established at Nelson has been wiped out. Years of meticulous scheming to place a mole at Camp McCarran - wasted. The Kings of Freeside are cooperating with the NCR now, which frees up soldiers to defend the dam. You even disrupted a promising weapons deal with the Van Graffs. So tell me this, because I really want to know: I am feared - with good reason - but you of all people dare to come before me, the mighty Caesar. What were you thinking?
The Courier: That I'd decorate this tent with your guts!

 

The Courier: I'll cast down your Codex and bask in the dying agony of those who hold it dear. (To some BoS schmucks)

...or pretty much any player dialogue from New Vegas?

Quote

Jessup: What the hell? You're that courier Benny wasted back in Goodsprings! You're supposed to be dead!

The Courier: I got better. / Yup, and now I'm a ghost, here to haunt you. Boo!

 

Veronica: You look like shit. Where do you come from?

The Courier: The grave.

Veronica: Nevermind, you look great then.

(I'm quoting from memory here so I may be wrong, but the idea is the same)

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

Quote

The Courier: Nice mask. Can't wait to take it as a trophy.
Legate Lanius: We shall see how brave you are when nailed to the walls of Hoover Dam, your body facing west so you may watch your world die.

 

I fuckin loved Lanius, he was awesome despite the fact he only meet him and talk him barely a moment :D, she showed his ideals, twisted honour his traits, we can even argue him about many things via speech and barter and convince him.

 

For a last boss and with a short interaction, we got quite a character from it :) 

 

Well Horrigan is not the deep guy, but Master was good shit back there :) .

 

This is what I miss the Bethesda ones, good final boss with meaningful interaction.

 

Even Caesar explans all shit he done and his philosopy, Father can't even explain his shit.

 

Even the colonel guy talked briefly his plans, but well he desperatly needed some interaction and possibility to side with him.

 

Well we got something with Eden, but he was just a head figure, puppet.

[guk]

On topic of things like "Glowing Sea etc vs realism"

 

 

First off, Fallout is IMHO not a sci-fi game taking place in our reality, but actually a fantasy game in a parallel world. Apparently that world developed almost indentical to ours until World War 2, but after that the similarities ebb away. More like a "what if..." setting.

It has metaphysical elements like immortal Ghouls who don't have to eat for 200 years, mama murphy's clairvoyance, Ghost People and so on. So the realism argument is kind of invalid, just like magic and dragons in Skyrim these things simply do exist in that fictional world.

The most important insight is that our natural sciences don't fully apply in Fallout, which is why i'm claiming that it is not really a sci-fi game.

 

 

And yes if you just look at Chernobyl, the place is completely lush green and overgrown now. The "chernobyl mice" are mostly healthy, though at least the birds frequently traveling in and out of the zone are often terribly mutated (ulcers and other deformities).

However the Chernobyl accident, despite its outcome still being measurable thousands of kilometers away in 2018, was a very limited and local occurence. We don't know what happens after a full-scale nuclear world war with ten thousands of megaton warheads blowing up across the globe.

The very least we expect would be a nuclear winter, which could cause catastrophic changes in the world climate. On top of that also an extremely hazardous level of radiation from contaminated dust in the atmosphere, forcing people to live belowground indefinitely. Though it also could have even worse, unexpected consequences.

 

So i think that the blighted wasteland in Fallout *might* actually be closer to reality than we expect when just looking at Chernobyl. Though ultimately it doesn't really matter since as mentioned, the world of Fallout is a fantasy setting anyways. And most importantly, a game with its own rules.

[Invictusblade]

the problem i have found with comparing nuclear bomb effects between real world and fallout.

is that of the data on real world nukes were done in empty sites (deserts and underwater)

while in fallout, most of the bombs were dropped on cities with fusion reactors in every car and who knows what was in the blast zone

[Benmc20]

4 hours ago, Invictaxe said:

the problem i have found with comparing nuclear bomb effects between real world and fallout.

is that of the data on real world nukes were done in empty sites (deserts and underwater)

while in fallout, most of the bombs were dropped on cities with fusion reactors in every car and who knows what was in the blast zone

Don't forget the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...